Everyday supernatural

Happy as Lazzaro, the remarkable new Italian film currently streaming on Netflix, has a kind of unassuming modesty to it—a calm, matter-of-factness that moves gradually and irresistibly into kinds of dramatic and poetic profundity that are both unexpected and compelling.

The Lazzaro of the title is a young rustic, an orphaned peasant who lives and works—more or less—with a cluster of sharecroppers on a remote estate in central Italy. As played by Adriano Tardiolo, he’s a sturdy country kid with an angelic-looking face. He seems naïve and unsophisticated, but he’s also quick to take on any task or chore that the others ask of him.

The first half of the film meanders amiably, gliding among the everyday realities of the earthy little world in which Lazzaro seems both familiar and alien. The chief dramatic developments early on are the arrival of the Marchesa Alfonsina de Luna (aka “The Tobacco Queen”) and her family at the plantation-like estate, and the quasi-fraternal friendship that develops between Lazzaro and Tancredi (Luca Chikovani), the Marchesa’s awkwardly rebellious teenage son.

The peculiar ironies of that half-formed bromance are integral to the larger social and psychological perspectives that writer-director Alice Rohrwacher weaves into this deceptively leisurely story. But a seemingly fatal accident changes things, and the second half of the film finds Lazzaro in a modern city, trying to reunite with Tancredi and other folk from the estate.

In the process, Rohrwacher spins out a series of ironic contrasts between urban and rural in the modern age, with special attention to the recurring patterns of exploitation that mark the social milieux through which Lazzaro passes. Better yet, Lazzaro himself grows in mythological status, a kind of Lazarus figure in workaday guise, a trickster hero with a touch of the supernatural about him.

The film maintains a basic realism throughout and, crucially, those touches of the supernatural emerge from the ongoing action within the realistic settings rather than from any special effects or outright fantasy. A key instance of that comes of Lazzaro remaining the same age in both halves of the film, while characters from the first half have aged considerably when they turn up in the second half. Plus, Lazzaro’s eerily pivotal encounter with a wolf and an episode in which church music is stolen nudge the film toward what one critic has called “magic neorealism.”

Happy as Lazzaro has already turned up on some major reviewers’ “Top Ten” lists for 2018. It really is that good.