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Happy as Lazzaro
****
Dir: Alice Rohrwacher
Starring: Adriano Tardiolo, Nicoletta Braschi
(Italy, 12A, 2hrs 7mins)
“Lazzaro!” everyone shouts in this film. Everyone wants something from Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo). It quickly becomes evident that he is everyone’s skivvy in this family. Much in the way that Anthony in The Royle Family is forced to continually make everyone tea, Lazzaro is expected to do everyone’s chores. He is kind and gentle, a teenager who keeps to himself.
Lazarro’s peasant family seem to be exploited by their position on the farm on which they live. And they live off very little. There’s an atmosphere of stagnation. The family just sits around, and stare in silence. The film captures the mundanity of everyday life, following a community of people economically exploited, turning to other means for sources of income. The dry day without wind is only broken by a crying baby when Nicola – their superior – comes to discuss finances. He sits down at their kitchen table in his suit, juxtaposing a symbol of wealth against the background of their squalor-like abode. The quaint and deliberate aesthetic is almost smudged and dream-like somehow, like an oil painting. The cracked, dry heat seeps through the screen; one feels parched watching it. The chickens are missing, he says. The wolf got them, the family explain. “Thus, I will have to add them to the debts,” he says, scrawling them down. The family have very little leverage in the position that they’re in. And Lazzaro, as ever, is quiet. He seems so quiet sometimes one wonders if he is dull.
Tancredi, the antagonist to Lazzaro’s latent laid-back outlook, appears to be a spoiled brat. He befriends Lazzaro and asks him to help in orchestrating his own kidnapping – the pace of the movie alters. Lazzaro finds himself questioning reality – and should we be, too? There is a certain ethereal quality to the set and world at this point – almost draped in dreams. Lazzaro becomes delirious. Waking up, he walks back into a world where everyone is all of a sudden tired, shouting, riding electric motor chairs and arguing about the price of things. Lazzaro has remained young. “Why has everyone left the Inviolata?” Lazzaro asks, as a young woman dresses him, taking care of him. The woman pulls down an article she has framed: “Scandal in the Tobacco Industry” it reads. “Slavery in our day. 54 farmhands forced to work without pay. Alfonsina de Luna, the Queen of Cigarettes, was arrested yesterday on her estate, Inviolata.” Charged with racketeering, fraudulent bankruptcy, aggravated fraud, tax evasion…” it goes on. A great swindle, goes the headline.
Alice Rohrwacher’s work is incredibly atmospheric and evocative, with a sense of pathetic fallacy interspersed throughout the pastoral village story. The twinkling music reminds one of a fairy on a stand, circling itself, metal music plopping from inside of the box, the seals of the plastic mold for the ballerina gathered up around the folds of her tutu. Adriano Tardiolo’s fawn-like face a vehicle for innocence and purity, in search of those he lost in his last life. Happy as Lazzaro is one of those films that already seems aged and classical as a new release.
words Ruth Seavers