Went with friends to the New York Film Festival to see the third feature film "Happy as Lazzaro" by Italian director Alice Rohrwacher. Astonishing insight, thinking and criticality are rare in contemporary European films. Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival. Born in 1982, Rohrwacher studied Literature and Philosophy at the University of Turin and then Drama. According to a post-screening Q&A, she was funded and spent six weeks in New York to write the script. She said the experience of being away from family, friends and her home country at the time also helped her grasp Lazaro's sense of alienation from the world around her.
The film is a calm and profound social fable, the first half of which is like a medieval manor (reminiscent of Omi's "Clogs Tree"), Lazaro is a good farmer who works hard and does not complain, and his interactions with the "young master" and other "slaves" constitute a rich relationship. A world where people cross a river and enter another world: landless peasants become marginalized poor in highly industrialized and capitalized cities. Nothing is free here, they have to cheat and steal to make a living. Of course, since the 1980s and 1990s, the rampant transnational financial industry has destroyed the traditional family industry, and the original sin of the former has replaced the original sin of the latter (their former glory was only superficial and has fallen to the bottom). But banks have become relentless, well-run machines in which most people are mere parts and accomplices, including the seemingly civilized urban upper-middle class who can go from cowardly egoists to murderous thugs in the blink of an eye. At this time, the wolf is no longer the enemy of human beings, because it can recognize a "good man's smell" and not eat him, and the wolfishness of man hinders their ability to recognize "good man". What they do is exploit or destroy.
In Italian films, religion as the authority of the ruling class has become the object of criticism to varying degrees (such as Desica's "The Bicycle Thief" and some of Visconti's films). In this film, the priest in the first half is almost a butler's fool Assistant (similar to the social role of the priest in Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin"), the "Queen of Tobacco" does not let serf children go to school, but teaches them every day to obey authority is to believe in God; the latter part of the church ceremony also Privileged to be made to order, urban refugees are driven out by nuns. But on the other hand, the director's thinking is still within the spirit of religion, including Pasolini's "Theorem" and Lazaro's metaphor of saints. The transcendence of religious music follows the poor, such as the church organ music in Rossellini's Deutsches Zero, which attracts the desperate boy Edmund to stop.
The director said that the film may seem pessimistic, but there may be an optimistic core, one is the possibility of the characters returning to the countryside to live a life without exploitation, and the other is the kindness we see and feel in the character of Lazaro, maybe It has the power to change (perhaps a bit too utopian at this point). The question I asked her was the repetition of the subaltern suffering in Italian cinema and the contemporary reference of the film (refugees and political crises in Europe, the divide between rich and poor, etc.) Visconti's "The Earth is Fluctuating") From the 1960s and 1970s to the present, movies continue to appear, and society continues to deteriorate. The collective power of change once contained in the film has now been lost. This involves the social role of the film, what it can do, how it can be expressed and criticized, and the rest is powerless. But with such a powerful movie, it is far better than chaos and stupor...
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