Avis des critiques

At once palimpsestic and precise, Happy as Lazzaro layers together Biblical allegory, Italian history, and its own neorealistic forebears without compromising the lucidity of its politics.

As played by the young, sweet-faced Italian actor Adriano Tardiolo, the slightly cherubic Lazzaro is a figure of pure grace, and a seemingly ideal protagonist for a beautifully crafted and surpassingly lyrical movie with the tone and texture of a folktale.

These landscapes recall the soothing pastoralism of Ermanno Olmi’s post-neorealist films, scenes grounded by an impulse towards mundane detail and naturalistic camerawork. But what sets Rohrwacher on a terrain of her own is the distinct way she centers anachronism as an existential condition.

Happy as Lazzaro employs career performers, but it’s made with the same abundance of sympathy and curiosity [as Italian neorealism films]—as well as with an unexpected, gobsmacking cleverness.

It has the quality of hallucination, of fable, of folk tale—while being absolutely modern and rooted, however obliquely, in the contemporary real. It’s so traditional that it feels decades old, at the very least, yet it’s one of the freshest films of the year.

This movie feels bracingly new and also like something that has been here forever. It has the urgency of a news bulletin and the authority of a classic.

Borrowing themes and tropes from such grand directorial forerunners as Visconti and Pasolini, Rohrwacher imaginatively maps the ills of modernity onto long-standing injustices. Only some on-the-nose symbols and facile political sentiments diminish her majestically playful, fiercely empathetic vision.

Indifferent to the misanthropic trend prevalent in today’s cinema, Rohrwacher’s beautiful, painful movie alerts us to the maladies of our time while also providing us with the emotional tools to defeat them.

The rules of the film, of time, are never quite clear but Rohrwacher uses other instincts to carefully tie the film together, giving it a special coherence, one based on cinema, on the progression of light and texture and landscape, instead of traditional narrative logic.

As it continues, the film begins to conform to Lazzaro’s rhythms, revealing itself as a gratifyingly tricky, mercurial work of magical realism with one foot firmly in its country’s political cinematic past.

Rohrwacher mines the untenability of Alfonsina’s position for acidic satire, using subtle visual humor to poke fun at the marquise’s blinkered perspective.

By Competition standards at least, Alice Rohrwacher’s third feature Happy as Lazzaro demonstrated a surprising degree of ambition, pushing the bucolic atmosphere of her 2014 Grand Prix-winning The Wonders further towards fable while folding in such new, theoretically incompatible ideas as time travel and social realism with supple assurance.