Happy as Lazzaro

Alice Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro felice) won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes 2018, Rohrwacher's third major Cannes appearance after Corpo Celeste (2011) and The Wonders (2014). The film consolidated her position as one of the most distinctive contemporary Italian auteurs of her generation; her subsequent La Chimera (2023) extended the same broad register. Adriano Tardiolo, in the central role, was a non-professional cast on the strength of his face.

Lazzaro (Tardiolo) is an extraordinarily kind young man (almost luminously trusting) exploited along with the rest of his sharecropper community by the Marchesa Alfonsina de Luna on her remote tobacco estate Inviolata. The estate is so geographically isolated that the sharecroppers do not know the Italian abolition of sharecropping has long since occurred. A friendship begins between Lazzaro and the Marchesa's wayward son Tancredi (Luca Chikovani), and the film follows the consequences across a structural shift the film performs in its second half, moving from rural Italian neorealism into a more allegorical register involving urban poverty and the long shadow of agricultural exploitation.

Hélène Louvart's photography in 16mm (the actual mountainous Lazio location of Bagnoregio standing in for the Inviolata estate) produced one of the most distinctive visual registers of recent Italian cinema. The film operates simultaneously as fable, social-realist drama, and a sustained meditation on sainthood and the moral cost of rural-to-urban Italian migration. Alba Rohrwacher (the director's sister), Sergi López and Nicoletta Braschi anchor the supporting cast.