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The Good Life Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro is one of the most imaginative films of the year. She tells us how she embraced fairytale rhythms and magic realism to tell a politically potent tale about the evils of capitalism
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n new Italian film Happy as Lazzaro, realism and poetry sit side-by-side. Speaking to Alice Rohrwacher, the film’s 37-year-old writer-director, one senses similar qualities. Sometimes her answers will start by describing the humdrum aspects of filmmaking and end in a romantic flourish. At other times she’ll begin with an ironic, almost sarky response, before taking her train of thought to deeply sincere places. Rohrwacher’s film opens like a classic of the neorealist style in which her nation used to specialise. We’re in a bucolic valley in the company of a small
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Interview: Jamie Dunn community of hardscrabble tobacco sharecroppers, who look as if they’re barely surviving. Clothes and living conditions suggest at the very least a pre-war setting. Money and food are in short supply – beds too. The extended family numbers the dozens, spread across four generations, all living on top of one another in a few crumbling farmhouses. Among the throng is Lazzaro, a strapping teenage boy with an angelic face on whose broad shoulders much of the farm’s labour falls. The lad, as good and honest as they come, accepts his unequal share of chores with a nod and a smile. These simple peasants are ruled over by a tyrannical marchioness – dubbed ‘the queen of cigarettes’ – but when this landlord does appear on the scene it’s clear not all is as it seems. For one thing, the marchioness has dragged her moody teenage son, Tancredi, along with her, and with his bleach blond
hair, vibrantly coloured t-shirts and brick-sized mobile phone in hand, he looks like he’s just stepped off the set of 80s teen sitcom Saved by the Bell. The marchioness, it appears, has failed to inform her employees that feudalism was outlawed years ago, keeping them in blissful ignorance as they harvest her tobacco crops for practically nothing. This plot setup, Rohrwacher explains, was inspired by a real-life incident. “There was this strange but true piece, not very important, tucked away in the newspaper, saying something like ‘How stupid are these peasants?’” she recalls. “‘The marchioness forgot to tell them the law changed 15 years ago and they’re still thinking they are part of her property.’ I’ve seen so many stories about people who’ve used their privilege to keep other people in ignorance, but this little article I read many years ago, I always remembered it.” >>