Hap­py as Lazzaro

There is mag­ic in Laz­zaro, the pre­cious look­ing farm­hand on a tobac­co estate far removed from Ital­ian soci­ety. He is the focus of Alice Rohrwacher’s Hap­py as Laz­zaro. He is will­ing to do any­thing asked of him – make cof­fee, car­ry heavy bales of hay – with­out ques­tion. His fam­i­ly of docile farmhands also work end­less­ly on an estate for no pay and are told they are always in debt.

In the midst of cel­e­bra­tions, he agrees to go out­side to make sure no chick­ens have escaped and, in doing so, bumps into a groundskeep­er. To the ques­tion of whether he is will­ing to take over the man’s shift to watch out for wolves, Laz­zaro says agree­ably and with a look of mild cheer, ​“Sure!” He says yes to every request that is made of him. But look at his face: a cheru­bic out­line and big angel­ic eyes that betray only a wish to do good.

Actor Adri­ano Tardiolo’s moon­lit hazel peep­ers are rem­i­nis­cent of those large lanterns of sight that lit up the face of Giuli­et­ta Masi­na in Fed­eri­co Fellini’s The Nights of Cabiria, and an incan­des­cent expres­sion – is it sad­ness? – that recalls Buster Keaton. His mop­pet hair falls just bare­ly over his eyes like a raga­muf­fin, but a glow fil­ters past the unkempt strands.

Paired with Rohrwacher’s direc­tion, Tardiolo’s Laz­zaro is an exam­ple of the cre­ation of a leg­endary look. He is unread­able, though it’s less impor­tant to artic­u­late exact­ly what he sym­bol­is­es than it is to con­sume the tidal wave of emo­tion you get from gaz­ing upon him.

And yet, Tan­cre­di (Luca Chiko­vani), the Mar­quis and the son of the ​‘Queen of Cig­a­rettes’, under­stands this lan­guage. As much as the film is about the exploita­tion of labour across time and place, and the cru­el real­i­ty of eco­nom­ic inequity, Rohrwach­er keys into a curi­ous, enchant­i­ng, heart­break­ing dynam­ic that exists between the hand­some, bad boy blond, Tan­cre­di and the com­pa­ra­bly tat­tered Lazzaro.

At the mere sug­ges­tion, on Tancredi’s part, that the two could be half-broth­ers, Laz­zaro finds an anchor in his way­ward life. It appears that, even though he is hap­py to do any task asked of him, that a more tan­gi­ble con­nec­tion to artic­u­late solace and/​or the dynam­ics of pow­er that exist on the tobac­co farm exists in the form of Tancredi.

The rela­tion­ships in the film are large­ly antag­o­nis­tic, or unsteady in their bal­ance of pow­er. The dynam­ic between Laz­zaro and Tan­cre­di is an excel­lent and uneasy inter­ro­ga­tion of the notion of how much some­one with class pow­er and priv­i­lege real­ly cares for anoth­er who is devoid of those things.

What hap­pens when there is such dis­par­i­ty between two peo­ple who care for one anoth­er, and what are the polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions of one per­son car­ing for anoth­er? There is some­thing mag­net­ic and mer­cu­r­ial between Laz­zaro and Tan­cre­di, and Chikovani’s mod­el good looks trans­mit a melan­choly air almost as pow­er­ful as Tardiolo’s.

The innu­en­do and oblique sug­ges­tive­ness of Laz­zaro and Tancredi’s dynam­ic feel inten­tion­al, as tex­tur­al and detailed as the land­scapes that the two walk across in their time togeth­er. It makes for a fit­ting, haunt­ing, burn­ing tes­ta­ment to queer­ness and its sur­re­al and mate­r­i­al rela­tion­ship to class and labour.