Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018) (Patreon)

Happy as Lazzaro shares some clear stylistic affinities with Rohrwacher's previous film The Wonders, which I found irksome and affected. I had some difficulty again with the aggressively rough, deep-rural cinematographic approach, which saturates everything with a "timeless" atmosphere and harkens back a bit too explicitly to Rossellini and especially Pasolini. But ultimately I admired Lazzaro more than I liked it, finding it to be a compelling intellectual experiment.

In a way, it shares certain traits with Christian Petzold's Transit. Both films are characterized by a complicated play between past and present, to such a degree that the viewer frequently isn't sure whether he or she is watching a period piece or a film set in the present day. As it turns out, Lazzaro is a film about an isolated community that has been kept in slavery to a Marquise (Nicoletta Braschi) simply because they had no idea that sharecropping and feudalism had been dismantled. So in the first half of the film, we are witnessing a 19th century sensibility dotted with 21st century incongruities -- cars, motorcycles, refrigerators, and such.

At the center of this clan is Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo), a very strange character to be sure. His family treats him like a beast of burden, a slave among slaves. He has a placid, doe-eyed look that marks him as either a simpleton or an angel. The film is a kind of picaresque journey in which Lazzaro moves from situation to situation without ever changing or learning. Again, Rohrwacher leaves it to us to evaluate this situation. Either he is too dumb to adapt (cf. Chauncey Gardner in Being There), or he is simply perfect as he is (cf. Balthazar).