Happy as Lazzaro

The Saint Who Didn’t Know He Was Holy

I keep thinking about the moment Lazzaro first sees the wolf. Not the actual wolf—the one that pads through the tobacco fields like a ghost—but the way Adriano Tardiolo’s face registers something between wonder and recognition, as if he’s just been handed a mirror he didn’t know he needed. There’s no dialogue, no grand gesture, just the quietest shift in his posture: shoulders loosening, head tilting slightly, as if to say, Ah, so this is what I’ve been waiting for. It’s the kind of acting that doesn’t announce itself, the kind that makes you lean forward in your seat without realizing you’ve moved.

And then the wolf walks away, and Lazzaro follows, not with urgency, but with the slow, inevitable pull of a man stepping into his own myth.

That’s the paradox of Happy as Lazzaro: a film that feels both ancient and urgently modern, a fable that refuses to explain itself, a story about innocence that’s anything but naive. Alice Rohrwacher’s third feature is the kind of movie that lingers in your peripheral vision long after it’s over, like a half-remembered dream you can’t quite shake. It’s beautiful, frustrating, and occasionally maddening—often all at once.

Rohrwacher has always been a filmmaker obsessed with the liminal spaces between reality and myth, but Happy as Lazzaro is her most ambitious attempt yet to blur those lines. The film unfolds in two distinct halves, though the transition between them is so seamless it feels less like a shift in time than a shift in perception. The first act is a pastoral tragedy, a neorealist portrait of sharecroppers toiling under the thumb of the Marchesa Alfonsina de Luna (Nicoletta Braschi), a woman who keeps her workers in a state of feudal servitude long after the practice has been outlawed.

Lazzaro, the purest of them all, is content in his ignorance, a saintly simpleton who accepts his lot with a smile. His friendship with Tancredi (Luca Chikovani), the Marchesa’s bored and restless son, is the film’s first brush with the surreal—Tancredi, a boy who fancies himself a revolutionary, treats Lazzaro like a pet project, a living experiment in goodness.

But then, without warning, the film lurches forward in time. The sharecroppers are suddenly adrift in a modern city, bewildered and exploited in new ways, while Lazzaro—unchanged, ageless—wanders among them like a ghost. The second half is where Rohrwacher’s vision fully reveals itself: a magical realist allegory about the persistence of exploitation, the way capitalism recycles old cruelties into new ones.

It’s also where the film’s detractors lose patience. The pacing slows to a crawl, the symbolism grows heavier, and Lazzaro himself becomes less a character than a vessel for the film’s themes. (I’ll admit, there were moments when I wished Rohrwacher had given him just a little more interiority—a flicker of doubt, a moment of anger, anything to make him feel less like a walking metaphor.)