Lazzaro is an extraordinarily kind young man exploited by sharecroppers on a tobacco estate so remote it has been cut off from modernity altogether — until a friendship with the landowner's wayward son sets in motion a quietly miraculous rupture in time. Rohrwacher's fable moves from rural arcadia to the brutal present tense of capitalism, using Lazzaro's impossible goodness as a rebuke to a world that has no use for saints.
