Happy as Lazzaro is the third feature from Italian director Alice Rohrwacher. It’s a strange film, outlining a tale of a callous tobacco baroness, her feckless son, and the damage their self-interest inflicts on a small group of poor agricultural labourers who believe themselves to be indentured serfs. We see events unfold from the perspective of one of their number, a young boy called Lazzaro. This unhappy group toil relentlessly, unaware that Italy has outlawed share-cropping, and with it the system of indentured servitude that lingered in the Italian countryside. Effectively, the workers see themselves as ‘belonging’ to the Marchesa (played by a chilly Nicoletta Braschi).

When the Marchesa’s chain-smoking teenage son visits the remote estate, he entangles the guileless Lazzaro in his plot to inveigle money from his cold and distant mother. The plot fails miserably, of course, but it puts into motion the events that lead to the ‘liberation’ of these hoodwinked rustics.

Adriano Tardiolo plays Lazzaro as a moon-faced innocent. The son of nobody, but the dogsbody for the extended family network that comprises the labourers. Luca Chikovani plays the cynically entitled Tancredi – who makes a pretence of disapproval for his mother’s swindle, but perpetuates the lie regardless.

When the Marchesa’s bizarre ruse is rumbled, her former serfs must find their feet in the modern Italy – and the film seeks to draw sharp lines between the status of the underclass across the ages.

Happy as Lazzaro is an allegory about exploitation, and the worst of humanity. Lazzaro is a symbol of goodness, and the film asks whether goodness can survive in the world. Initially, I read the film as attempting to make a statement on the shift to modernity and the exploitation inherent in this slow revolution. But I don’t like this reading. We’re clearly shown a modern remnant of a semi-feudal system albeit one operating illegally. This glimpse is reminder enough that ‘pre-modern’ entailed plenty of exploitation, and that it’s a false start to mythologise the past in this way. Through every age, it seems clear, there have been elites and with them, a put-upon peasantry. Whether in the pre-modern, the modern, or the late-modern of neoliberal capitalism.

Rohrwacher has discussed the ideas behind the film in relation to the experience of migrants and refugees, persons who have no experience of modernity or urban living, who are suddenly destitute in a dystopian cityscape. The panic of a refugee crisis is certainly a motivating theme of Italian politics right now. The film shows the new serfdom of migrant labour in the agricultural sector, as persons assemble to make the lowest bid for back-breaking work, while being told how lucky they are to have it. In her allegory, the displaced peasant workers of the Marchesa’s estate arrive as migrants from a pre-modern age, and Rohrwacher chronicles their navigation of 21st-century city life.

In the postlapserian second half of the film, after the rumble and the expulsion, Alba Rohrwacher slides into a role as one of the former child labourers. Rohrwacher brings a wonderful humaneness to the part – a warmth that brings something new and needed to an otherwise bleak story. Lazzaro himself, our hapless protagonist, offers a pitiable figure, into which we can pour ideas of vulnerability and fragility, but on his own he makes for a curious central figure, more automaton than hero.

The time jump is a fascinating instance of surrealism or magical realism, or whatever you want to call it, if you were being crude, you could call it fantasy. The film doesn’t make any heavy-handed judgements on which life was better – living the lie or bearing the reality. In the end, it invites the viewer to draw the parallels between both.

One of the starkest elements of the film is the physical Italy that it depicts. This is an Italy on film that is defiantly not romantic. The film makes strange with the Italian countryside, in a way I have not seen Italy on screen before.

The film’s vision falters somewhat as it nears its end. The imagery in these final scenes is no longer useful, or else I just found it difficult to navigate the signs. Either way, I felt I had lost the film’s story, or it had lost me. Nevertheless, as I left the cinema (and still) I tried to think about how it could be interpreted.

Happy as Lazzaro is a strange vision – a compelling story of innocence lost that invites many readings and operates, perhaps most successfully, as a fable about exploitation through the ages.

4/5