For Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, the inspiration for her new film, Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro) came from a small article she had read in the newspaper, when in high school, about sharecropping. “We discussed it in our class. It was like any other article that you read and forget the following morning,” she recollects. What stayed with her, however, was the larger theme — how people who are in a privileged position take advantage of it to exploit others. “It’s very common, the way power is used to exploit other people,” she says. And it need not just be a class thing. “The power play can also exist within the same class,” she says, something she tries to underline in her film.
Dressed casually in skinny black jeans and a mustard-and-black top, with her hair held high in a casual bun, Rohrwacher is visibly tired but cheerful after many a round of interviews at one of the press terraces at Palais de Festivals et des Congres de Cannes. She perks up in between at the sound of a familiar song playing at the loud bar below, almost does a jig, and then, just as easily, gets back to talking seriously about her film that is competing for the Palme d’Or today.
(FromL) Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, Spanish actor Sergi Lopez, Italian actress Nicoletta Braschi, Italian actor Adriano Tardiolo and Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher pose on May 14, 2018 during a photocall for the film "Happy As Lazzaro (Lazzaro Felice)" at the 71st edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France. / AFP PHOTO / LOIC VENANCE
Looking inward
Born in Tuscany, Rohrwacher, 35, is no stranger to the French Riviera. Her début feature, Heavenly Bodies , premièred at Cannes in 2011, where it played in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar. A coming-of-age tale of an adolescent girl struggling to re-settle in South Italy, it was about her conflicts with her mother, sister, her own self and with the Catholic church. She was immediately heralded as a young and distinctive voice in cinema.
Her sophomore film, The Wonders , took her a step forward; it bagged the Grand Prix at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Set in the familiar world of honey farms (her German father had been a beekeeper), it starred her actor sister Alba in a key role — that of the mother in a beekeeper family. Alba stars again in Lazzaro Felice and has been giving Rohrwacher company on the red carpet and the photo-calls in Cannes. Speaking to filmmaker Sofia Coppola in a 2015 interview, Rohrwacher had said that working together is dangerous for the two sisters: “We have a very strong relationship, but all that love can lead to a lot of conflict.” But it doesn’t seem to have yet; so far so good.
A fantastical world
For someone who grew up in the countryside without much access to films (which, she admits, made her desire that world even more), a career in filmmaking happened almost accidentally. “I met a producer after making a tiny, four-minute documentary, and he asked me to write a movie. So I wrote one and then he said, ‘Now you have to direct it’,” she told Coppola during the interview. In fact, the first day of shoot on Heavenly Bodies was the first time she had ever seen a set.
- This one is never as easy to predict as an Oscar. Last year, Ruben Ostlund’s The Square got the better of festival favourite Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute, leaving even jury president Pedro Almodovar in tears. Nearing the end of Cannes 2018, we can’t stick our necks out for one to win the Palme d’Or, but are willing to hedge our bets on five.
- Lazzaro Felice: The content and Rohrwacher’s beguiling storytelling has everyone talking.
- Cold War: A beautifully realised love story from Pawel Pawlikowski, of Ida fame — complete with his trademark austere images and bleak lansdcape.
- Shoplifters: A heart-warming yet devastating comment from Hirokazu Kore-eda on the tenuousness of families.
- 3 Faces: Jafar Panahi, the director in absentia, provides an affecting yet strong critique of patriarchy in Iran.
- The Wild Pear Tree: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s reputation precedes his film. The very last to be screened this year, it has his acolytes, without even having seen the film, hoping he will pick up the Palme D’Or.
Her third time in Cannes could get luckier for Rohrwacher, what with the film being seen as a frontrunner for the Palme d’Or. Variously described as “beguiling”, “time-bending”, and marked by a “dizzying temporal and tonal shift”, Lazzaro Felice has had many ecstatic post its screening last Sunday. The Guardian wrote, “Rohrwacher has crafted a magic-realist fable that doubles as an origin myth for a modern Italy subsumed by corruption and decline.” Set in the Italian countryside, it is about a tobacco magnate and sharecrop farmers. Things take a turn when simple peasant boy Lazzaro strikes a quaint friendship with the magnate’s son Tancredi. The countryside then makes way for urban chaos and the inequities don’t just stay; they get magnified.
The world of tobacco was used for a reason as the film’s setting, Rohrwacher says. As it is a luxury produce, it helped foreground and critique the social inequities central to the film with more focus. Asked if she was inspired by any Italian auteurs, she says there are more involuntary inspirations than voluntary ones. “I believe cinema produces good memories in the conscience. Perhaps there are unconscious references.” As for the time travel in the film, which has many befuddled, she asserts cinema is meant to take the audience on a ride. She is aided in this by cinematographer Helene Louvert who whips up breathtaking imagery on screen.
(FromL) Italian actor Adriano Tardiolo, Italian director Alice Rohrwacher and Italian actor Luca Chikovani pose on May 14, 2018 during a photocall for the film "Happy As Lazzaro (Lazzaro Felice)" at the 71st edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France. / AFP PHOTO / Loic VENANCE
State of good
Rohrwacher tells us that though she started off by making a political story, she decided to give it an “unreligious religious dimension”, which explains the magic realism and element of fable and fantasy. “Considering the universal value of the story, we felt the need for lightening it up a bit. We talked about this character who is so innocent as to become ridiculous,” she explains.
Her protagonist, Lazarro, is a mythological name that is often referred to as more of an entity than a real person. “I wanted to give it a body and turn him into a human being,” she says. Lazzaro is the epitome of purity; he is untainted. “He is sheer goodness… It is not a usual character who has an arc in the film. Who follows a series of things, changes and becomes good. He is good from beginning to end. Even in a world that is changing, he cannot change,” she adds. In that sense he belongs to another age, he is naive because pure, endless goodness prevents him from judging good from evil.
Does she see the countryside as a repository of this untainted goodness and the urban space being a corrupting influence? Rohrwacher denies it has anything to do with the city or the countryside. “I am not making a positive or negative judgement on either of them. Goodness is like a wild flower, it can blossom anywhere — in the field or in the street.” Hopefully, it will bloom for her this Sunday at the Palme d’Or presentations.
* Update: Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro Felice won Best Screenplay at the 71st Cannes Film Festival. Streaming giant, Netflix, has also bought the North American and Latin American rights to the film.
