![]() ![]() When a man arrives one afternoon to deliver supplies, he drives a beat-up pickup truck. The village structures are ancient and dilapidated but lit by electric bulbs. ![]() Instead of storybook lushness, the image is lean and hungry-the location has a more parched, severe sense of beauty. There is something artificial about this sense of pastness, however. Guilelessness is Lazzaro’s forte as the film opens, he’s swiftly established as the most habitually put-upon-and yet, paradoxically, most sweetly agreeable-member of a peasant community whose clothing and customs are recognizably archaic, almost like something out of the Middle Ages. The Best Movies of 2018 The Top 10 Films of the Year How can a population see through the lies of its leaders if the truth of the situation isn’t even on the table? In that much-mocked but genuinely ambitious thriller, the director of The Sixth Sense did a poor job of disguising his broadly allegorical story’s signature twist-that its characters were living in a controlled present-tense simulation of the American past-but still managed to ask some interesting questions about the relationship between innocence and experience. She leaves the task of repressing reality to her story’s villains, whose control over Lazzaro and the other inhabitants of a mountainside tobacco plantation brings to mind, of all things, M. Rohrwacher, who copped a prize at Cannes for the film’s deceptively spare screenplay, is a filmmaker of real imagination, meaning that while she understands the power of fairy tales, she doesn’t fully believe in them. But Happy as Lazzaro is not as innocuous as its namesake. ’Tis the season for ranking things, and although it’s arriving late, Happy as Lazzaro is absolutely one of the year’s major new works-don’t make a list without it.Īs played by the young, sweet-faced Italian actor Adriano Tardiolo, the slightly cherubic Lazzaro is a figure of pure grace, and a seemingly ideal protagonist for a beautifully crafted and surpassingly lyrical movie with the tone and texture of a folktale. As with Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the film’s broadly mainstream digital platform is at once at odds with, and hopefully supportive and nurturing of, its utterly distinctive and original artistic vision. There hasn’t been a more decent and selfless movie hero this year than the title character of Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, a sublime new Italian movie released directly to Netflix last month. ![]()
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