MIFF Session 12: HAPPY AS LAZZARO

Lazzaro is the village gopher. Some might call him idiot but if he jumps to anything that anyone else tells him to do it is not with incomprehension. With his beatific glow and awkward gait he's a kind of Charlie Chaplin imagined by Raphael. He doesn't know who either of his parents are but has a grandmother (who is probably just the old lady that everyone calls Nona). Scene by scene we learn that these modern day farm workers are more like feudal serfs, bound to their land and tobacco crop by the local Maquisa and her family.

But even corrupt rustic idylls have a limit. The young Marquis stages his own kidnapping with the aid of Lazzaro which is cut short when an accident befalls the latter. When the police arrive to investigate the kidnapping they find the necker cube moving away from them: the peasant life is actually the horrific enslavement we were seeing.

When Lazzaro wakes from his unconsciousness it is decades later but he hasn't aged a day. We have already seen local religious postcards of saints and we have heard Lazzaro and the young Marquis call the wolves in their mountain isolation. When Lazzaro rises and goes looking for the people of his former life he finds things have changed beyond recognition but also that even the corruption of time and bitter experience need not mean the end of life. If he is a saint he is one tied to a landscape from millennia before, an Etruscan line, perhaps. In any case he seems destined for either of the ends that await the saintly: apotheosis or martyrdom.

This curious magical realist tale is given to us with heavy serves of both elements but, damn me, if it doesn't also feel as light as a feather. It's a kind of Bela Tarr homily rendered in the colours of Breughel and the daydreams of Cervantes. It is exactly what the bungled Jupiter's Moon from last year: a credible and acceptable tale of the power of simple goodness indebted to no particular religious party. Is there a faith based on the transference of human venality to the plain survivalism of the wolf? If there isn't I think it might have a case with this tale.