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Happy as Lazzaro (2018)
Feb. 22nd, 2019 11:13 pmTonight I watched Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro felice) and let me tell you, that title is extremely misleading.
The one (1) accurate description of I’ve seen anywhere is as a “modern fairy tale.” The plot descriptions I was able to find online either basically only cover the first half of the film (“Lazzaro, a good-hearted young peasant, and Tancredi, a young nobleman cursed by his imagination, form a life-altering bond when Tancredi asks Lazzaro to help him orchestrate his own kidnapping”) or are wildly understated (“Purehearted teen Lazzaro is content living as a sharecropper in rural Italy, but an unlikely friendship with the marquise's son will change his world.”)
It's a beautiful, mesmerizing, dreamlike film for those first 30-40 minutes, before taking a sharp turn for the WTF, and then settles into a bittersweet blend of magical realism and social commentary. I cried for almost the entire last hour and a half of the movie.
Spoiler-y plot description below the cut:
( Read more... )
If you don’t want to read the version with spoilers, I can only describe the plot as a combination of Rip Van Winkle, Bridge to Terabithia, a number of classic fairy tale tropes, and various stories associated with St. Francis of Assisi. The story of St. Francis and the wolf is an actual motif in the film, but Lazzaro reminds me of the story of Brother Juniper, one of St. Francis’ original followers, a sort of “holy fool” who was known for his generosity and simplicity.
The more I think about it - and read into it on the internet, because despite nine years of Catholic school, I’d never even heard of Brother Juniper until my post-movie googling - the more I can see the parallels. There’s a key scene where Lazzaro’s innocent attempt to help someone is interpreted as theft/violence, which is pretty much the summary of the most famous story about Brother Juniper, only that one ended with the other guy having his heart changed by Juniper’s innocence and kindness, while Lazzaro’s, uh, doesn’t. Such Is The Modern World, which I think is the point of the film.
At the beginning of the film, there’s a sense of complete timelessness. I kept trying to guess when it was supposed to take place but had to re-assess with every new detail: is it the 1950s? The 1990s? Who knows! The setting is eventually confirmed as modern and there is an in-world explanation for the ambiguity, but it initially heightens the film’s fairy-tale vibes.
My favorite part of the film was the initial development of the friendship between Lazzaro and Tancredi; it’s got the king-and-lionheart dynamic that gets me in the feels me every time, and both characters are magnetic in their own, very different ways. Like children, they create their own world: a rocky valley is the surface of the moon; they imagine themselves as knights in shining armor, the possibility of being half-brothers. It is Tancredi who invents all of these things, but it is Lazzaro's complete faith that makes them, in a sense, real.
The one (1) accurate description of I’ve seen anywhere is as a “modern fairy tale.” The plot descriptions I was able to find online either basically only cover the first half of the film (“Lazzaro, a good-hearted young peasant, and Tancredi, a young nobleman cursed by his imagination, form a life-altering bond when Tancredi asks Lazzaro to help him orchestrate his own kidnapping”) or are wildly understated (“Purehearted teen Lazzaro is content living as a sharecropper in rural Italy, but an unlikely friendship with the marquise's son will change his world.”)
It's a beautiful, mesmerizing, dreamlike film for those first 30-40 minutes, before taking a sharp turn for the WTF, and then settles into a bittersweet blend of magical realism and social commentary. I cried for almost the entire last hour and a half of the movie.
Spoiler-y plot description below the cut:
( Read more... )
If you don’t want to read the version with spoilers, I can only describe the plot as a combination of Rip Van Winkle, Bridge to Terabithia, a number of classic fairy tale tropes, and various stories associated with St. Francis of Assisi. The story of St. Francis and the wolf is an actual motif in the film, but Lazzaro reminds me of the story of Brother Juniper, one of St. Francis’ original followers, a sort of “holy fool” who was known for his generosity and simplicity.
The more I think about it - and read into it on the internet, because despite nine years of Catholic school, I’d never even heard of Brother Juniper until my post-movie googling - the more I can see the parallels. There’s a key scene where Lazzaro’s innocent attempt to help someone is interpreted as theft/violence, which is pretty much the summary of the most famous story about Brother Juniper, only that one ended with the other guy having his heart changed by Juniper’s innocence and kindness, while Lazzaro’s, uh, doesn’t. Such Is The Modern World, which I think is the point of the film.
At the beginning of the film, there’s a sense of complete timelessness. I kept trying to guess when it was supposed to take place but had to re-assess with every new detail: is it the 1950s? The 1990s? Who knows! The setting is eventually confirmed as modern and there is an in-world explanation for the ambiguity, but it initially heightens the film’s fairy-tale vibes.
My favorite part of the film was the initial development of the friendship between Lazzaro and Tancredi; it’s got the king-and-lionheart dynamic that gets me in the feels me every time, and both characters are magnetic in their own, very different ways. Like children, they create their own world: a rocky valley is the surface of the moon; they imagine themselves as knights in shining armor, the possibility of being half-brothers. It is Tancredi who invents all of these things, but it is Lazzaro's complete faith that makes them, in a sense, real.
