Happy as Lazzaro
**9/10**
*Happy as Lazzaro* feels like an old folk tale somehow telling us everything about the modern world. Alice Rohrwacher begins with something close to Italian neorealism: an isolated community of tobacco farmers trapped in an almost feudal system, exploited by the landowners and quietly exploiting the one person even lower than themselves. Then, halfway through, the film makes a strange and beautiful leap into myth, and suddenly the entire story opens up.
Lazzaro is one of the most memorable characters I’ve seen in a long time. Played with incredible stillness by Adriano Tardiolo, he is not merely naive or simple. He feels almost outside ordinary human behaviour, incapable of suspicion, resentment or cruelty. Everyone uses him, orders him around and mistakes his goodness for stupidity, yet he never becomes bitter. In another film this kind of holy innocent could have been unbearable, but here he remains mysterious, moving and completely believable.
What makes the film so powerful is that Rohrwacher never treats the countryside as an innocent paradise destroyed by modernity. Inviolata is beautiful, but it is also built on deception and exploitation. When the film moves into the city, the old feudal order has disappeared, yet nothing has really improved. Aristocrats have been replaced by banks, landlords, police and other systems of power. Poverty changes its clothes, but the structure remains. One form of exploitation simply becomes another.
The grainy Super 16mm cinematography gives the film the texture of something half remembered. The warm fields and crumbling houses slowly give way to colder urban spaces, but the images always retain a strange, dreamlike quality. Time itself feels unstable, with the film moving between realism, Catholic symbolism, folklore, political satire and fairy tale without ever fully explaining its magic.
There is something deeply Pasolinian about its anger at a society that no longer knows what to do with innocence, beauty or genuine goodness. Yet the film is never purely cynical. It remains attentive to small miracles: shared food, music escaping from a church, an act of generosity from people who have almost nothing. These moments do not defeat the cruelty of the world, but they briefly refuse it.
The ending is devastating because Lazzaro’s goodness cannot protect him. In a world organised around greed, innocence becomes not merely vulnerable but almost offensive. And yet the film does not present his goodness as pointless. Rohrwacher’s own tenderness, imagination and beauty become a form of resistance.
A strange, compassionate and quietly radical masterpiece. It feels ancient and completely contemporary at the same time, like a story that has always existed but has only just been discovered.
*Happy as Lazzaro* feels like an old folk tale somehow telling us everything about the modern world. Alice Rohrwacher begins with something close to Italian neorealism: an isolated community of tobacco farmers trapped in an almost feudal system, exploited by the landowners and quietly exploiting the one person even lower than themselves. Then, halfway through, the film makes a strange and beautiful leap into myth, and suddenly the entire story opens up.
Lazzaro is one of the most memorable characters I’ve seen in a long time. Played with incredible stillness by Adriano Tardiolo, he is not merely naive or simple. He feels almost outside ordinary human behaviour, incapable of suspicion, resentment or cruelty. Everyone uses him, orders him around and mistakes his goodness for stupidity, yet he never becomes bitter. In another film this kind of holy innocent could have been unbearable, but here he remains mysterious, moving and completely believable.
What makes the film so powerful is that Rohrwacher never treats the countryside as an innocent paradise destroyed by modernity. Inviolata is beautiful, but it is also built on deception and exploitation. When the film moves into the city, the old feudal order has disappeared, yet nothing has really improved. Aristocrats have been replaced by banks, landlords, police and other systems of power. Poverty changes its clothes, but the structure remains. One form of exploitation simply becomes another.
The grainy Super 16mm cinematography gives the film the texture of something half remembered. The warm fields and crumbling houses slowly give way to colder urban spaces, but the images always retain a strange, dreamlike quality. Time itself feels unstable, with the film moving between realism, Catholic symbolism, folklore, political satire and fairy tale without ever fully explaining its magic.
There is something deeply Pasolinian about its anger at a society that no longer knows what to do with innocence, beauty or genuine goodness. Yet the film is never purely cynical. It remains attentive to small miracles: shared food, music escaping from a church, an act of generosity from people who have almost nothing. These moments do not defeat the cruelty of the world, but they briefly refuse it.
The ending is devastating because Lazzaro’s goodness cannot protect him. In a world organised around greed, innocence becomes not merely vulnerable but almost offensive. And yet the film does not present his goodness as pointless. Rohrwacher’s own tenderness, imagination and beauty become a form of resistance.
A strange, compassionate and quietly radical masterpiece. It feels ancient and completely contemporary at the same time, like a story that has always existed but has only just been discovered.
Mini Review: **9/10** *Happy as Lazzaro* feels like an old folk tale somehow telling us everything about the modern world. Alice Rohrwacher begins with something close to Italian neorealism: an isolated community of tobacco farmers trapped in an almost feudal system, exploited by the landowners and quietly exploiting the one person even lower than themselves. Then, halfway through, the film makes a strange and beautiful leap into myth, and suddenly the...
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