Deborah Ross

I’m sorry I haven’t a clue

Alice Rohrwacher’s tale of exploited sharecroppers isn’t a waste of your time but it is confusing

issue 06 April 2019

Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro sets out as a neorealist tale of exploited sharecroppers, but midway through the story it falls off a cliff (literally) and returns as magical realism, although we mustn’t hold that against it. Or should we? I was sad to see the first narrative go, frankly — come back! Come back! — and the second half rather lost me. This film is beguiling and intriguing and poetic (she says, defensively) but God knows why it couldn’t have carried on as it began, and God knows what it adds up to. I haven’t the faintest.

Written and directed by Rohrwacher (The Wonders, Corpo Celeste), the film won the prize for best screenplay at Cannes. It is set in a tiny hamlet in Italy that is also a tobacco plantation where the workers are so poor they sleep heaped on top of one another and share a single light bulb which they pass around.

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