I’m sorry I haven’t a clue

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. They earn no wages as the estate’s owner, the marvellously cruel Marchesa De Luna (Nicoletta Braschi), keeps them permanently in debt. However, this isn’t the 19th century, as there is the light bulb and glimpses of Walkmans and brick-like mobile phones, so it’s probably set at some point during the 1980s, when sharecropping was no longer legal but these workers don’t know that. (Apparently, this part is based on a true story.)

Our protagonist is Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo), a young man who has no immediate family and whom the community exploits in turn, albeit fondly. It’s ‘do this, Lazzaro’ and ‘do that, Lazzaro’ and ‘carry grandma inside, Lazzaro’. (Grandma is very, very old.) ‘I exploit them and they exploit him,’ notes the Marchesa. ‘It’s a chain reaction that can’t be stopped.’