Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher was awarded the Grand Jury Prize back in 2014 for her sophomore effort, “The Wonders,” a drama filled with magical but natural surrealism starring Monica Bellucci and Alba Rohwacher, the director’s sister. A Jane Campion-led jury felt as if they had discovered a new, singular talent and critics thought the same with positive reviews and sky-high anticipation for what she would deliver next.
READ MORE: The 2018 Cannes Film Festival: The 20 Most Anticipated Movies
Well, expectations at Cannes were met this week, and then some. Rohrwacher’s third feature, “Lazzaro Felice” is the kind of second-crest breakthrough that furthers an already flourishing career. This film, a sort of hybrid of Pasolini and Bresson, is a scathing indictment of the social problems in Italy as seen through the eyes of a — let’s be clear here — dim-witted Dostoyevskyan protagonist, a simple peasant returning to his life 20 years after his death.
Lazzaro, as played with wide-eyed naivete by Adriano Tardolio, is a man (or should we say boy) filled with kindness. He lives on some remote Italian farm in the permanent effervesce of a family household with a rather confusing genealogy. Poverty is very much an everyday struggle for Lazzaro’s clan, but they live a happy life with not much complaining. Their work consists of growing tobacco leaves for the extravagant Marquise, a sort of Queen of Tobacco, who goes every summer to her property near Lazzaro’s farm.
As all this occurs, Rohrwacher quietly disorients, playing with time and place, never defining what decade the story takes place, keeping the milieu ambiguous. The workers have dirty clothes, animals surround them, hell, even what they eat looks like it’s from another time. Eventually, Lazzaro befriends the son of the Marquise, a rather provocative fellow who takes advantage of Lazzaro’s kindness. The picture up until then is slow-moving, rather pedestrian, but nevertheless builds up Lazzaro and his entourage as humanly as possible. Yet everything changes when Lazzaro falls off a cliff.
To say more would ruin the surprises this film has in store for the viewer. It’s as if another more memorable, masterful movie begins with a time-jump of several years. Rohrwacher starts to mix the farcical with the surreal, evoking the timeless 1960s cinema of Fellini and Pasolini.
Don’t mistake Rohrwacher as a nostalgist. Yes, this an almost anachronistic movie that hypnotizes you with its brilliant frames, much like the aforementioned Italian auteurs’ classic pictures, yet the director strikes a chord because she is essentially tackling our modern world, one lacking any kind of harmony and meaning, making poetry out of the darkness. A beautiful sequence involving Lazzaro entering a church playing an organ-driven tune and leaving as the music follows him is transcendent, and the last hour of the film contains multiple similarly beautiful sequences. Tardolio, who plays Lazzaro, is such a captivating figure and his performance nails just the right pitch, even when doing very little in most situations.
Lazzaro thus crosses through eras, like a biblical angel, but without destroying anything. He just reveals his presence in the world, the scandal of social injustice and the hope of a better future. Through a few dreamlike, discreet and beautifully placed sequences, Rohrwacher makes us believe that a world of empathy and accord may someday exist again. [B+]
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30KW3i3bxEo
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