Film
Happy as Lazzaro
- Director
- Alice Rohrwacher
- Certificate
- TBA
- Running Time
- 125 mins
The winner of the Best Screenplay award at Cannes, Italian writer/director Alice Rohrwacher‘s third film is a wildly imaginative slice of magical realism. Set in a village dominated by a nasty tobacco baron known as the Queen of Cigarettes, it follows the eponymous jolly, naive peasant, who forms an unlikely bond with a disillusioned young nobleman named Tancredi. Before long, Tancredi has recruited Lazzaro to orchestrate his own kidnapping.
If you think you know where this is going, hold on to your seat for the wild time-travelling twist that arrives just in time to rescue the film from the growing suspicion that it might turn out to be no more than a bucolic, arthouse Forrest Gump. As Time Out enthused: “With a rich, textured plot in which things are never quite what they seem, Rohrwacher paints a magical portrait of the decay of rural life, intertwining the past and the present in a work that is as exhilarating as it is sublime.”
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