A startling journey into the dark heart of Italy
Happy as Lazzaro 12A cert, 127 min
★★★★★
Dir Alice Rohrwacher Starring Adriano Tardiolo, Alba Rohrwacher, Luca Chikovani, David Bennent, Sergi López, Nicoletta Braschi, Tommaso Ragno
Happy as Lazzaro is an earthy fable about a peasant boy who wouldn’t harm a fly, and it won the best screenplay prize in Cannes last year. The setting is a run-down tobacco estate in central Italy where the outlawed practice of sharecropping
has somehow survived deep into the 20th century.
Not that we’d be able to date it, at first. The film begins with a rustic courtship ritual that paints this village as a holdover from the feudal age. These farmers subsist on bread and olives, working the land to pay their rent to its owner, an imperious tobacco tycoon called the Marchese, viperishly played by Nicoletta Braschi.
The villagers live in huts in the valley while the Marchese and her family, including her son, Tancredi, are waited on in their crumbling hilltop mansion. Dragged to live here against his will by his mother, Tancredi is played by Youtube star Luca Chikovani, cast for his cruel, lanky quality. He befriends Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo), but starts to exploit this asexual simpleton like everyone else, plotting to stage his own kidnapping, blame the boy, and extract the ransom from his mother.
An hour in, director Alice Rohrwacher effects a shocking transition – I remember the awed gasps at Cannes – and the film moves forward elusively in time, essentially charting the shift in Italy from feudal past to modern capitalist iniquity, and using her holy fool of a hero like a canary in the coal mine for both predicaments.
The film summons profound love for a character – a village idiot that it would never let you describe that way – without congealing into sentimentality. It clings on to Lazzaro like the only hope in a benighted world, while Tardiolo, whose debut this is, gives the sort of performance that makes it impossible to see anything but the character inside him. He’s a total delight to watch.