HAPPY AS LAZZARO (LAZZARO FELICE) World Cinema

In auteur Alice Rohrwacher’s stunning third feature, a simple young man named Lazzaro works with other unpaid laborers on an isolated estate in the Italian countryside. But when Lazzaro suffers an accident, HAPPY AS LAZZARO kicks into high gear as a work of fantastic time-jumping poetry and grounded social critique. Anchored by a hypnotic, guileless performance by newcomer Adriano Tardiolo, whose face could have been lifted from a Renaissance painting, LAZZARO is shot in beautifully textural 16mm, and recalls themes from Rohrwacher’s earlier films — the otherworldly, the biblical, and the day-to-day lives of those in insular Italian rural communities — but here suffused with an aching melancholy that makes this Rohrwacher’s best work to date. – Beth Hanna