Happy As Lazzaro

Umbrian-Tuscan countryside, last two decades of the twentieth century.

The law of March 3, 1982, no. 203 provides for the conversion of existing sharecropping contracts into rental agreements. However, the Marchioness Alfonsina de Luna owns Inviolata, a tobacco plantation in an isolated area where about 50 peasants continue to work, exploited under this now illegal agricultural contract.

The Marchioness, called "the serpent," believes that "human beings are like animals, freeing them means making them aware": an exploitative relationship seems inherent in human nature; indeed, Lazzaro, a naive 20-year-old boy, is exploited in turn by the sharecroppers.

The story revolves around this innocent and willing orphan and his friendship with the Marchioness's son, who detests his life, his exploitative mother, and the condition in which the sharecroppers live. He devises a plan and needs Lazzaro's help, who does not hesitate to assist in the cause.

The two young men lose sight of each other because Lazzaro/Francesco falls from a cliff, and a wolf spares him because it senses his goodness.

Lombard city: A group of poor outcasts live in makeshift homes on the fringes of reality, surviving through scams and scavenging, forced to live without any modern comforts.

Lazzaro arrives, and as "Lazzaro," he is miraculously alive and, finding himself alone, goes to the city: he wants to find his lost friend Tancredi, the Marchioness's son, and meets his old peasant companions.

People's Bank: Lazzaro enters, and here the story concludes.

Thesis: Material Middle Ages

Sharecropping, where there is the servant and the master, the harvest is divided, and surplus value is not even considered because the work is not paid. There is an absolute identity of being and duty, with a single certainty in this context: a singular presence here and now before those who live it, the simple lived experience, the pure and simple self-awareness.

When this pure and simple self-awareness becomes a relationship with the other, namely with the master, it becomes self-consciousness that frees the servant from the countryside and leads him to the city.

Antithesis: Human Middle Ages

Here, self-consciousness should reverse the roles, with the master becoming the servant of the servant, who has absolute necessity, and the servant becoming the master of the master, who absolutely needs him.

But the phenomenology of Rohrwacher's modernity alienates itself from the becoming of the Hegelian spirit.

In the city, the master/lord has disappeared; only the servant remains, freed from the master not by the dialectical process of self-consciousness but because the master has become invisible.

People's Bank - Synthesis: Economic-Spiritual Middle Ages

Lazzaro is in the same conditions as Tancredi but does not know it; the antithesis has been completed without self-consciousness, and the miraculously alive man enters the bank to ask for the money taken from Tancredi. Goodness and naivety are met with incomprehension, mockery, and violence; no synthesis is possible while the dialectical process completes itself because the master is now Nobody.

A bizarre and surreal journey for a bitter, vital, and ontologically mortal tale.

The obsolescence of the goodness of Voltaire's Candide, "in the best of all possible worlds," is resurrected in Rohrwacher's Lazzaro to tell the story of the "worst of all possible worlds," that of the great deception: one that recognizes no dignity other than being functionaries at different levels of capital, that master named Nobody who endures in societies that call themselves humanistic, even if built on the despoilment of man.

Rohrwacher's plot does not seem at all coincidental, a web in which one cannot help but be entangled; the countryside, the city, the people's bank.

A screenplay with an implacable triad: countryside-servant; city-consumer; bank-subject.

From the material Middle Ages to the human one, to the collapse of the spirit.

A poignant act of accusation against a hypocritically covered and disguised reality and an irreparably violated "civilization."