Synopsis
Purehearted teen Lazzaro is content living as a sharecropper in rural Italy, but an unlikely friendship with the marquise’s son will change his world.
Votre Filmothèque
Cast
- Adriano TardioloLazzaro
- Agnese GrazianiAntonia (young)
- Luca ChikovaniTancredi (young)
- Alba RohrwacherAntonia
- Sergi LópezUltimo
- Tommaso RagnoTancredi
- Natalino BalassoNicola
- Nicoletta BraschiMarchesa Alfonsina De Luna
- Carlo MassiminoPippo
- Daria Pascal AttoliniMaria Grazia (Adult)
Recommandations
- 100
The Film Stage
You could argue that Lazzaro Felice owes a debt to Pasolini with its fascination for peasants, saints, and faces, or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez with its mix of rural life and magical realism, but that would be to discredit the shear vivacity and boldness of Rohrwacher’s directorial hand, not to mention her incredible warmth as a filmmaker. - 90
Screen Daily
Beautifully shot, like Rohrwacher’s other features, on Super-16, this film, with its richly textured images, does indeed feel at times like a retrieved and rather miraculous relic from a lost era of cinema, which is not to say that it isn’t of its own moment. - 90
Village Voice
Lazzaro Felice has genuine sweep and grandeur, and Rohrwacher’s most impressive feat here might be her ability to find just the right narrative and emotional distance for each section of the story, as it moves from rustic drama to picaresque journey to more pointed social allegory; we’re always given just enough information to understand and appreciate the characters’ interactions and motivations. - 83
IndieWire
The movie lulls you into its unpredictable rhythms, and a striking poetry creeps into the material, finally overtaking it. - 83
The Playlist
Through a few dreamlike, discreet and beautifully placed sequences, Rohrwacher makes us believe that a world of empathy and accord may someday exist again. - 80
The Guardian
With Happy as Lazzaro, Rohrwacher has crafted a magic-realist fable that doubles as an origin myth for a modern Italy subsumed by corruption and decline. - 80
Variety
The film, for all its interest in fables, trades less in morals than in equivocal, irony-laced human observation. Rohrwacher deftly skirts sentimentality even as she risks big, expansive poetic gestures. - 75
The A.V. Club
Though gently outraged in its portrait of class divisions, Happy As Lazzaro mostly takes its tonal cues from the eponymous character’s comically gentle, trusting nature.
