
Lazzaro felice (Happy as Lazzaro). 2018. Italy. Directed by Alice Rohrwacher. DCP. In Italian; English subtitles. 130 min.
Alice Rohrwacher’s modern fable of class struggle and human decency traces the life of Lazzaro, an impossibly earnest young man working as a tobacco sharecropper in contemporary Italy. When officials discover that the group working the land has been illegally held in servitude, Lazzaro and his compatriots are relocated to the city, and the harshness of pastoral feudalism is traded for the harshness of urban survival. Like the wild greens Lazzaro forages from cracked cement, Rohrwacher finds magic and kindness amid the brutality of our modern world. Courtesy Netflix