Film review

  • Happy as Lazzaro

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lazzaro Felice

    Alice Rohrwacher (2018)

    The writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s parable of the vices of contemporary society, showing at the London Film Festival, isn’t short of older cultural references.  The title character’s name translates as Lazarus.   An important part of the story derives from the legend of St Francis of Assisi and the Wolf of Gubbio.   Halfway through Happy as Lazzaro, the young hero, good as his name, rises from the dead – the main justification for describing the film, as plenty of critics have, as a magic realist fable.  That seems to mean, in this case, making use of supernatural elements in order to give a fanciful lift to grim political themes that a non-magical realistic treatment would render unrelievedly dismaying.

    The first half of the story takes place in the countryside, the second in the city.  The rural setting is an isolated village, ironically named Inviolata, and its mountain environs.  Although the time is the recent past, perhaps the last decade of the last century, the locals’ way of life – their rudimentary living conditions and credulous superstitions – reflect much older traditions.  They work on a tobacco plantation – it later emerges as unpaid labour.  Sharecropping has been illegal for years but the Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna (Nicoletta Braschi), the tobacco-magnate plantation owner, has flouted the law since 1977, when floods in the region left her estate inaccessible from the outside world (and her malpractice inviolable).

    It’s not only because the workers’ true circumstances aren’t immediately revealed that the viewer doesn’t get an impression of slave labour:  the atmosphere is too torpid for that.  In the early stages, Alice Rohrwacher’s narrative is as uneventful and its tempo as slow as the rhythm of the sharecroppers’ lives but she gradually develops a focus on the relationship between Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo), one of the younger peasants, and Tancredi (Luca Chikovani), the Marchesa’s wilful, entitled son.  Tancredi has bleached hair, a miniature dog called Ercole (more irony) and time on his hands.  He decides to pretend to have been kidnapped.  Receiving a ransom note, his mother is amusingly unimpressed:  she’s sure Tancredi’s faking it – just like the time when he feigned leprosy.

    The benign, acquiescent Lazzaro gets the jobs none of the other peasants wants, such as guarding the chicken coop against wolves, and Tancredi takes a liking to him largely because Lazzaro is so easy to exploit.  Tancredi doesn’t fancy drawing his own blood in order to give the ransom note a drop of credibility; Lazzaro obligingly cuts himself instead.  The latter has made a kind of lair for himself in the mountains above Inviolata:  Tancredi holes up there, listening to his Walkman and vainly waiting for his mother to pay the ransom.  One day, the usually sure-footed Lazzaro is walking in the mountains when he trips and falls, apparently to his death.  A man-eating wolf arrives on the scene.  Like its Gubbio ancestor, the animal is pacified by the presence of goodness (which presumably made Lazzaro an inspired choice to protect the chickens too).  The wolf leaves Lazzaro’s body alone and goes on its way.

    A few screen moments later, Lazzaro comes to and picks himself up.  He walks down the mountain, back through the now virtually deserted De Luna estate and all the way to the nearest city.  En route he comes upon a group of immigrant refugees.  In the city, as he stares at the first television screen he’s ever set eyes on, a TV news report explains how the Marchesa’s crimes came to light and were punished.  Lazzaro has walked into the future.  Physically quite unchanged himself, he soon encounters others from the Inviolata community, all aged by the passage of years.  Peasants from the estate are now part of a living-rough urban colony.    When Lazzaro encounters Ercole (or a new version of him), he realises Tancredi can’t be far away.  The skinny young aristocrat has turned into a paunchy debauchee (Tommaso Ragno), fallen on (relatively) hard times.

    Like its protagonist, the film takes on a new lease of life in the second half.  This includes plenty more incident than the first, as well as more definite political bite.  This viewer struggled, however, to understand Rohrwacher’s scheme even on its own unrealistic terms.  There’s a nice moment when Lazzaro’s rustic knowledge identifies plants growing on waste ground as herbs rather than the weeds the townie petty criminal Ultimo (Sergi López) assumes them to be.  Once he knows this, Ultimo, as enterprising as he’s desperate, reckons the herbs good enough not only to eat but to sell.  I didn’t get why Antonia (Alba Rohrwacher, Alice’s sister), whom Lazzaro knew on the estate as a teenage girl (Agnese Graziani), was sharp enough to cheat a well-meaning middle-class woman out of cash but then insisted on using the group’s very limited funds to buy expensive pastries for a visit to the apartment where Tancredi and his similarly spoiled sister now reside.  Rohrwacher perhaps means to illustrate how the peasants remain in thrall to their former oppressors (and that the latter are as ready as ever to exploit their goodwill) but Antonia doesn’t seem the best choice of character to demonstrate this.

    In a striking episode close to the end of the film, Lazzaro and the have-nots are drawn to a church by the sound of beautiful music coming from it.  When they enter the place, chilly nuns tell them a private service is taking place and that they’re not welcome.  As they leave, the church organist discovers that his instrument has gone mute.  Outside, the music persists in the air for a little while.  The symbolism of the scene works well enough in a negative sense – the church’s loss of music is just desserts for its dismissal of those who wanted to partake of that music but were rejected as infra dig.  What, though, does it mean in symbolic terms for the deprived to hear the organ strains outside the church but for these to be transient?

    At this point too, Antonia announces that she and the others are going to return to Inviolata and make a new life there.  Why didn’t they think of doing so before – except that it didn’t suit Alice Rohrwacher?  She needs them out of the way now to clear the stage for Lazzaro’s big last scene.  On their visit to the De Lunas’ apartment, the sister tells the former sharecroppers that she and Tancredi have been brought low by the banks that are the true villains of the modern world.  Lazzaro therefore goes into a bank to confront the enemy.  Asked if he’s armed, he truthfully says yes; the bank security assume his weapon is a gun rather than the country boy’s sling he’s actually carrying.   He’s wrestled to the ground and other bank customers then proceed to beat him to death.  In the film’s final sequence, a wolf reappears, sniffs round Lazzaro’s corpse, turns tail and runs out of the city.

    I wasn’t sure if Rohrwacher meant the viewer to wonder, as I did, if Lazzaro might again rise again.  I was pretty sure she felt it was more important that we recognise that capitalism is enduringly exploitative and tends viciously to corrupt.  There may well be plenty in Happy as Lazzaro to characterise the social and moral ills being described as specifically Italian; if so, they were lost on me.  It should be said in the film’s favour that Adriano Tardiolo is gently magnetic and wonderfully natural throughout as the holy fool Lazzaro.  There are good supporting performances from Sergi López and another middle-aged actor called Natalino Balasso.

    17 October 2018

  • Roma

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfonso Cuarón (2018)

    About halfway through Roma, some of the main characters go to the cinema together.  The movie showing is Marooned, a John Sturges picture of 1969 in which ‘Three American astronauts are stranded in space when their retros won’t fire’ (IMDB).   Sounds familiar …  and the brief clip from Marooned that appears on the screen can hardly fail to bring to mind Gravity.  (The reference must be intentional.)  In most other ways,  the neo-realist drama Roma is remarkably different from Alfonso Cuarón’s previous film.

    Set in 1970 and 1971, Roma – which Cuarón also wrote, photographed, co-edited and co-produced – is inspired by his own upbringing in an affluent middle-class family in the ‘Colonia Roma’ district of Mexico City.  Cuarón was born in 1961 and it’s fair to suppose that the family’s eccentric, imaginative youngest child Pepe (Marco Graf), who talks matter-of-factly about what he did before he was born, is the film-maker’s alter ego.  Pepe’s older siblings are Toño (Diego Cortina Autrey), Paco (Carlos Peralta) and Sofi (Daniela Demesa).  Their parents are Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), a hospital doctor, and Sofía (Marina De Tavira), a biochemist.  The ménage also includes Sofía’s elderly mother Teresa (Verónica García) and a dog called Borras.  But the central character is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), the family’s maid, who shares household duties with another live-in servant, Adela (Nancy García García).

    From the very start, Roma is unusual – and not only because it’s shot in a limpid monochrome.  The titles appear against a shot of soapy water slopping over a tiled floor, the rhythmical image repeated to nearly hypnotic effect.  A passing aeroplane, tiny in the distance, is reflected in the water.  (Cuarón announces the ending of the film with the reappearance of a distant plane.)  Roma‘s opening sequence is one of several in which the camera seems fascinated by what it’s observing but Cuarón’s compositions, though artfully ingenious, are never only that.  The water overture is eventually revealed to be part of Cleo’s and Adela’s domestic drill, which is then described more fully.  When Antonio returns that evening, he parks his car in the narrow tiled driveway with great care and the camerawork replicates his close attention.  The precision parking and the gathering to greet the man of the house combine to give his homecoming an oddly ceremonial quality.  This makes sense in retrospect because we won’t see it happen again.  Antonio, who is having an affair with another woman, will soon leave the family home for good.

    The front door opens straight onto the street.  The tiled driveway lies between the entry and the main living area.  Each time someone opens the front door, they have to be careful not to let Borras out.  Cleo and Adela repeatedly clean up his excrement from the driveway.  The dog-related procedures, an unstressed and effective means of helping to develop a sense of domestic routine, are significant in another way – one that connects to a more important theme in Roma.  While Borras’s owners are clearly fond of him, it’s thoughtless to confine continuously to barracks a pet that needs regular exercise.   (A small area of the house that’s open to the sky supplies the dog’s only fresh air.)  And although they’re decent and responsible employers, the family take Cleo’s and Adela’s subservience for granted.  Cleo is, as well as a cook and a cleaner, responsible for most of the childcare.  Although she gets time off, she isn’t seen to have a life of her own – not, at least, until her personal circumstances change in a way potentially inconvenient to the brittle Sofía, who is increasingly oppressed by her collapsing marriage.  It seems one of Cuarón’s main aims in Roma is to celebrate a woman who, in his childhood, was simply always there and supportive.  He wants belatedly to recognise there was more going on in her world than he was able to see, to imagine what that world might have been.

    The visit to Marooned isn’t the only cinema outing in the film.  On their afternoon off, Adela and Cleo go there with their boyfriends, Ramón (José Manuel Guerrero Mendoza) and Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) respectively.  Only Adela and Ramón stay:  Cleo and Fermín decide to rent a room for an hour or two instead.  Not long afterwards, Cleo suspects she’s pregnant and it’s in a movie theatre that she tells Fermín this.  He’s fine about it, then gets up, saying he needs a toilet urgently.  He doesn’t reappear and Cleo doesn’t see him again until, through Ramón, she tracks him down.  Fermín then refuses to acknowledge the child as his.  He skedaddles again.  After giving birth to a stillborn baby, Cleo, although depressed, fully resumes her household role.

    The time and place in which Roma is set have a personal resonance for sports fans of my generation:  as a bedroom wall poster in the film confirms, Mexico has just hosted the 1970 World Cup; two years earlier, the Olympics were held in Mexico City.  Although most of the film’s action takes place there, two major episodes are located elsewhere.  In the first of these, Cleo and Adela accompany Sofía and the children on a visit to a family friend’s hacienda for New Year 1971.  Cleo, drinking a toast, has the cup she’s using knocked from her hand and it breaks on the floor:  the moment is startling though a bit portentous (it somewhat echoes the spilt drops of wine that signal ill fortune at the wedding in The Deer Hunter).  But the staging of the following sequence, when fire breaks out in a forest outside the house where the New Year celebrations are taking place, is stunning.   (In  earlier conversations, both the landowners and workers on the estate have mentioned increasing tensions over ownership of the land.)  The night-time blaze is, in the proper sense of the word, awesome.  People race out of the house with buckets of water to try to put out the fire.  A man dressed in some kind of hairy monster outfit – he’s referred to as ‘the bogeyman’ – sings a curious song with a melancholy melody and lyrics that, frustratingly, are un-subtitled.

    The second holiday episode occurs late in the film, at the Veracruz beach resort of Tuxpan, where Sofía takes the children and Cleo, not long after the latter has lost her baby.  The trip is meant to help Cleo recover although it turns out to be precisely timed by Sofía:  it allows Antonio to collect his possessions from the family home while she and the children are away.  Sofía takes the opportunity of the holiday to tell the kids that she and Antonio are splitting up.  The mother is portrayed increasingly unsympathetically:  on their last day at Tuxpan, she leaves Paco, Sofi and Pepe in Cleo’s care, even though she can’t swim and the two older children are in the sea.   They ignore warnings not to go in further and get into difficulty.  Cleo selflessly wades in and somehow gets them and herself back to the shore.  This isn’t just a notably dynamic piece of film-making:  Cleo’s devotion and the knowledge of what she has recently gone through make the sea rescue emotionally as well as literally oceanic.

    Sofía returns, there’s a relieved, tearful group hug, Cleo is thanked and told how much the family loves her.  She says she loves them too and confesses she didn’t want to have her baby.  That distressing, believable admission gives renewed and revised impact to an earlier scene in a hospital delivery room.  Even in a film that contains several brilliant sequences, this one stands out.  The doctors can’t detect a heartbeat while the baby is still in the womb.   After giving birth, Cleo lies in bed as, in the same shot, the medical team abortively attempts resuscitation on the newborn.  The new mother’s attention is so focused on the CPR that she hardly reacts to the medical staff removing the placenta and giving her stitches.  Cleo’s anguished breathing and the medics’ voices as they repeat and repeat the CPR routine combine powerfully on the soundtrack.  Once the baby is pronounced dead, a doctor – professionally compassionate yet businesslike – offers the corpse to Cleo so that she can ‘meet’ then ‘say goodbye’ to her daughter.

    Roma is impressively balanced.  It’s an extraordinarily natural dramatisation of boisterous fun, arguments and secrets within a family.   It revolves around a main character whom it places within a particular and vividly convincing larger context.  Cuarón builds the political dimension of the story skilfully and the character of Cleo’s dodgy, engaging boyfriend contributes importantly to this.   On the afternoon they rent a room instead of watching a film, Fermín shows off to Cleo his martial arts skills, completely naked and using a shower curtain pole as a prop weapon.  He proudly tells Cleo that martial arts training has been a route out of the anarchic poverty and criminal culture in which he grew up.  The display, both startling and comical at the time, becomes alarming in the light of later events.   When, after his hasty departure from the cinema, Cleo finally finds Fermín again, he’s participating in a mass outdoor martial arts class.  This takes place in a huge, largely barren landscape that seems to reflect the anomic world from which Fermín and others have developed into ‘warriors’.

    In the early part of the film, the political unrest for which Mexico City was notorious in the late 1960s and early 1970s is in evidence only in the characters’ conversations or as sounds in the distance.   This changes on the day Teresa takes Cleo shopping for a crib in a city centre department store (an instance of how Cleo’s employers, partly but not entirely out of self-interest, do right by their servant).  A student demonstration is taking place.  The atmosphere is already tense as Teresa’s driver Ignacio (Andy Cortés) parks in a backstreet and ushers the two women into the store from a side entrance.  Inside, they stand at a window watching the police and military laying into demonstrators outside[1].  Suddenly, the mayhem is happening inside the store.  A couple of wounded demonstrators rush in, trying to escape pursuing gunmen.  One of the latter shoots one of the two demonstrators dead as terrified customers try to take cover.  Another man points a gun at Cleo:  it’s Fermín.  He registers Cleo before running out of the store (the third time he’s left her at speed).  The next moment, her waters break.  The collision of events sounds melodramatic and perhaps Cuarón is forcing things into a too neat pattern here.  Yet the scene works on an emotional level and metaphorically too, as a reflection of the inescapability of Mexico’s prevailing political turbulence.

    Alfonso Cuarón shows controlled flair throughout and it’s not only in the story’s most intense moments that Roma is exciting to watch.  Take, for example, the sequence in which the family are on their way to the cinema showing Marooned.  Cuarón captures the movement of a crowded city street with such animation that we feel – and are thrilled to feel – we’re actually experiencing the life of a vanished time.  The film isn’t short (135 minutes) yet it feels economical – nothing is visually or dramatically surplus to requirements.  Yalitza Aparicio, whose first screen role this is, is outstanding in the lead.  Among the supporting cast, Verónica García and Jorge Antonio Guerrero do particularly good work.  The dialogue, which is mostly in Spanish, also includes some Mixtec[2] (Cleo is of Mixteco heritage).  Whether, as some are predicting, Roma becomes the first-ever foreign language film to win the Best Picture Oscar obviously remains to be seen.  (The distribution by Netflix, as well as the subtitles, could count against it.)  It’s certainly the best film of the eleven I saw at this year’s London Film Festival.

    14 October 2018

    [1] This is presumably the ‘Corpus Christi Massacre’ of 10 June 1971, the day of the Corpus Christi festival.

    [2] According to Wikipedia, ‘The Mixtec …languages belong to the Otomanguean language family of Mexico, and are closely related to the Trique and Cuicatec languages, together with which they form the Mixtecan branch of the family. They are spoken by over half a million people’.

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