A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, December 16, 2018

Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018)

Luca Chikovani and Adriano Tardiolo in Happy as Lazzaro
Lazzaro: Adriano Tardiolo
Antonio as a girl: Agnese Graziani
Tancredi as a boy: Luca Chikovani
Antonia as an adult: Alba Rohrwacher
Ultimo: Sergi López
Nicola: Natalino Basso
Tancredi as an adult: Tommaso Ragno
Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna: Nicoletta Braschi

Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Screenplay: Alice Rohrwacher
Cinematography: Hélène Louvart
Production design: Emita Frigato
Film editing: Nelly Quettier

The title character of Alice Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro is the perfect embodiment of the Holy Fool archetype, the naïf whose steady detachment from what "normal" people call reality provides a corrective influence on an increasingly haywire and self-obsessed society. Lazzaro begins as a worker on a hellish tobacco plantation somewhere in the heart of Italy, run by a marchesa whose sharecroppers are little more than slaves, kept in poverty and ignorance. But Lazzaro is happy, doing his part to help out everyone without complaint. And his happiness infects the surly son of the marchesa, Tancredi, who is bored and alienated, so that he enlists Lazzaro's help to fake his own kidnapping, while hiding out on a remote corner of the estate that Lazzaro shows him. Tancredi's ruse leads the police to investigate and to uncover the marchesa's illegal operation, shutting down the plantation and rescuing the workers from their enslavement. But in the midst of this upheaval, Lazzaro's part in the story takes a sharp and magical turn, as time passes and the scene shifts from rural exploitation to urban anomie. I'm not one for avoiding "spoilers," but the richness of discovery is part of this film's remarkable essence. Things happen that couldn't really happen, but even within the context of a brutal portrait of the real world they feel exactly right. Rohrwacher deftly avoids a descent into romantic primitivism while bringing to light some harsh truths about the world we have made for ourselves. In the end, we are led to contemplate the nature of happiness itself.
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