Happy as Lazzaro (2018)

Alice Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro is a magical-realist fable about debt bondage, aristocratic indifference, and the false promise of progress. Lazzaro, a purehearted sharecropper on the De Luna tobacco estate, follows orders with a saintly calm. The Marchioness keeps her peasants in perpetual debt, isolated by a washed-out bridge and centuries of habit. The film's animating anger is economic. It treats the bank as a devouring institution and modernity as a betrayal of the poor. That anti-capitalist current runs deep and clear. A female director and a coldly memorable matriarch provide a faint feminist texture, but the thesis remains class exploitation, not gender.

The picture avoids most contemporary cultural markers. There are no LGBTQ themes, no racial consciousness, no climate crusade, no body-positivity messaging, and no clinical interest in neurodivergence. Lazzaro's simplicity is folkloric and spiritual, a device for grace and suffering. The sharecropping setting is not revisionist history; it is a stage for parable. The film also declines to lecture. Its ideas arrive through images: a wolf, a broken slingshot, organ music that leaves a church and follows the poor. The sermon stays off the page. We get poetry instead.

In the second half, Lazzaro wakes unchanged decades later. The peasants are now homeless, scraping by in a city squat. A reunion with Tancredi curdles into humiliation and pastries. At the bank, Lazzaro asks for what belongs to the Marquis and is beaten by a crowd. He dies as the wolf escapes back to the countryside. The ending is bleak, tender, and unresolved. Rohrwacher's film is a serious vintage, complex and bittersweet. It earns its acclaim through craft and feeling, not through a checklist of virtues. We are left with the ache of collective happiness forever deferred.