Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro)

Happy as Lazzaro is a Netflix film, apparently commissioned by the streaming service but, as is often the case with international productions, made with the cooperation of a polyglot group of funding agencies involving just about every country in Europe (including Finland).  The film's executive producer, however, is Martin Scorsese and this is a vote of confidence, I think, in the excellence of the endeavor.  And, indeed, Happy as Lazzaro is an admirable film, beautifully made and well-acted, with an unusual premise and an even more ingeniously unusual script.  (The movie received the best screenplay award in 2019 at Cannes.)

Happy as Lazzaro plays a bit like Rip Van Winkel as imagined by Bertolt Brecht.  In effect, the movie presents a parable about oppression, but one that is refreshingly unsentimental and, even, casually cruel in its vision of how exploitation operates.  The town of Inviolata (presumably a symbolic or allegorical name) is a settlement in barren mountains somewhere in Italy.  Inviolata is an odd place -- it has a conspicuously smashed bridge over a stony stream and hillsides that are treeless, but criss-crossed with peculiar paths and terraces.  There are wooded groves on the edge of great precipices and strange tropical river-bottoms where peasants harvest tobacco.  About two dozen serfs work for an older woman who owns a strange tower-shaped chateau, a bit like a panopticon in a prison.  The relationships between the serfs are unclear.  The peasants are surly and use various kinds of magic to taunt their oppressors (as well as spitting into their food) but they are a scabby, toothless, ignorant lot and not too hard-working.  At the outset of the film, we see the peasants, who live in dark hovels, arguing about who will get to use the community's one and only incandescent light bulb.  A couple plans to marry and leave town, although the betrothal ceremony consists, more or less, of an exchange of bawdy insults about the bride-to-be's "fat ass".  A little band of peasants serenades the happy couple.  But, the next morning, in the cold light of day, we learn that the couple can't leave the estate because they owe money to the Padrone.  An overseer appears and renders an account -- the peasants who get their provisions from the female Padrone fall farther and farther in debt each season and, of course, are indentured to the land.  Everyone fears being expelled from the manorial lands, although no one seems to know what this would mean or where they would go.  Although the scenes on the estate, which comprise the first half of the film, seem to be set in the nineteenth century -- the social issues are the same as those motivating the plot of Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of the Wooden Shoes -- there are cars scattered around, although apparently smashed up and immobile, and people have adding machines and there is even a cell-phone owned by the boss' family.

Lazzaro is a beautiful young man with the features of one of da Vinci's angels.  He is sweet-tempe everyone orders him around.   He's the hardest working of all the peons because the serfs themselves use him as their slave.  Lazzaro has no mother and father; his only relation is an old granny who is as small as a chimpanzee and who he has to carry everywhere.  When someone complains about the peasant's being exploited, the mistress of the estate notes that she oppresses the peasants and that they, in turn, oppress poor Lazzaro --and she wonders who he exploits.  When his dog, Ercola, escapes, the son of the estate's owner, Tancredi, encounters Lazzaro.  Tancredi also has contempt for Lazzaro and bullies him incessantly but the poor serf interprets the rich son's cruelty as a form of friendship.  Indeed, Tancredi even claims that he and Lazzaro are brothers -- or "half-brothers" -- indicating that, perhaps, his father raped Lazzaro's mother.  Tancredi hatches a scheme to hide in a cave where Lazzaro has made a small retreat for himself.  He sends a ransom note to his mother demanding that 1 billion lire be paid to reclaim him from the bandits.  Tancredi's mother is indifferent -- she spends her time in religious instruction provided to the children of the serfs, when they are not required to provide child labor for her tobacco operation.  Lazzaro gets sick, and, while feverish, wanders around in the weirdly rugged and barren landscapes (chalky deep ditches and strange-shaped steep-sided bluffs).  He falls from the side of an enormous precipice -- this is like one of those dangers encountered in a dream:  you are ambling about and, suddenly, discover that you are on the brink of a two-hundred foot high crumbling escarpment.  The fall is enormous and Lazzaro simply vanishes from the movie for a while.  We don't know what happens to Tancredi's hare-brained hostage hoax.  One of the peons at the big house calls the police and says that someone has vanished on the estate.  A helicopter skirts over the strangely eroded and scoured hillsides and ravines and lands near the big house.  Then, it is revealed, although only gradually that the Estate is cut-off from the rest of the world because of a flood that has knocked down the one bridge leading into the manor's lands.  The serfs have been essentially imprisoned because, for some bizarre reason, they have been convinced that they will drown if they ford the stream -- it's only about six inches deep.

This is the midpoint of Happy as Lazzaro and the fulcrum on which the story turns.  Up to this point, we have construed the film as a somewhat stylized example of Italian neo-realism, a semi-documentary account of peonage (they call the system "sharecropping") that is some sort of relic of an older, discredited social order.  But, in fact, the film now reveals itself to be a kind of allegory and bizarre dream-like landscape of the manor home and its surrounding lands, now appear to be, in fact, a symbolic wasteland, a desert of oppression.   In fact, the movie has played a clever trick on us -- what we took to be realism is, in fact, highly stylized allegory.

A wolf appears and licks Lazzaro back to life.  He gets up and limps to the manor house that is now deserted, drowned in dust, and full of cob-webs.  Two thieves are looting the abandoned building and Lazzaro obligingly helps them when they claim that they are simply moving men transporting household furnishings to the city.  The thieves won't give poor Lazzaro a lift to the city, but they tell him that if he walks along the road "and walks and walks", he will reach the city.  And, so, he sets out on foot and ends up in the slums of squalid-looking metropolis (either Turin or Milan apparently but it doesn't matter -- this is the generic "city" as opposed to the generic "country" where the movie began.)  He meets a girl who was a child when Lazzaro worked on the tobacco plantation -- she's now about 35 and, so, it's apparent that, at least, 20 years have passed.  Lazzaro has not aged in the slightest.  The peasants are now living as squatters atop a building in what seems to be an empty water tower.  The whole crew is present but they are now much older.  The corrupt and vicious overseer is still around as well -- he's now exploiting refugees by getting them to bid against each other on agricultural piece-work (this form of oppression is even worse that what afflicted the peasants on the tobacco plantation.)  The peasants fall on their knees in front of Lazzaro and, at first, regard him as a ghost or a sort of saint -- I think his name is meant to suggest "Lazarus".  But gradually they fall back into the routine of exploiting him -- this time, he's used as a prop in elaborate con-games involving begging and the sale of stolen goods to well-meaning citizens in the big City.  (In fact, the citizens aren't that well-meaning -- the film's Brechtian cynicism shows that they get hooked into buying the stolen goods through their own greed.)  Lazzaro runs into Tancredi (again via his elderly dog Ercola, now wearing an inverted cone around his neck).  Tancredi, after being astonished at the fact that Lazzaro has not aged, hails his friend as his "half-brother" and, even, enlists him in an investment scheme involving the old manor.  But the bankers are unfriendly and throw Tancredi out of their skyscraper.  He invites the peasants to his apartment for lunch and they pool all of their ill-gotten gains to buy pastry (cannoli and profiteroles) as a gift for their host.  The children of the Estate owner are now grown but they are also poor -- the slavery scheme on the plantation resulted in their land being confiscated and large fines.  Tancredi doesn't come to the door when the peasants arrive for lunch -- but his sister has the audacity to both drive the peasants away as well as importune them for their pastries (which they obligingly leave at the door of the apartment).  Lazzaro goes to the bank, carrying a slingshot that is a memento of his time with Tancredi when the boss' son was a boy.  He makes some inarticulate demands on the bankers but is completely ineffectual. The customers in the queue in the bank turn on Lazzaro and beat him to death.  The old wolf appears, surveys the bloody scene, and, then, is last seen loping through the traffic in the big,  grim city.

The film is an excellent exploration of oppression and how those who are oppressed are not only complicit in their exploitation but more than willing to exploit others weaker than them.  Happy as Lazzaro seems to suggest that oppression is universal and ineradicable, a fundamental fact in the world.  But there is a counter-force represented by Lazzaro's virtue and the old wolf.  It's hard to understand what to make of Lazzaro's unfailing willingness to help others -- he doesn't even have to be bullied; he simply instinctively helps everyone that he meets without question.  Is Lazzaro's submissiveness a cause of exploitation or some sort of symptom of its remedy? This is for the viewer to decide, although the scales are tipped in favor of Lazzaro's sanctity --the violent ending, which I think questionable, is clearly intended as a sort of martyrdom consistent with the torments inflicted on other saints, a subject discussed in the first half of the film.

The director, Alice Rohrwacher, has built a very pretty, beautifully shot and mysterious film.  She doesn't move the camera excessively and, rather, composes each shot for maximum meaning and pictorial splendor.  (The opening shot of the ancient stone hovels where the peasant's live with a wheel-less car in the foreground establishes both the situation and the fact that there is no escape from the plantation.)  There are many interesting supernatural touches -- at one point, the music, made in a church for the private consumption of parishioners who exclude the peasants, travels with them and abandons the church.  One of the peasants can use the Evil Eye to stir up windstorms.  In the sequence in the city, the peasants still have only one light bulb -- although it's a modern energy-efficient bulb.  The movie's two-part structure is intriguing, inviting us to compare events showing oppression on the farm with their counterparts in the big city.  The film isn't sentimental -- the peasants, certainly, aren't romanticized.  This is an important film and the director is a talent to watch in the future.