By Manuel Yáñez-Murillo (Film Comment)
Translator: csh
The translation was first published in "Iris"
In the careers of film directors, there will always be moments when the films they shoot not only look back on their past works, but also foreshadow their future creative paths. For example, Roberto Rossellini made "Rome, Undefended City" after making what has been called the "fascist trilogy", and as soon as the film opens, we realize that the director is in the film Consciousness and aesthetic awakening; and in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dane's Rosetta, the Belgian brothers are a reversal of the austere, precise style of "One Promise", The opening scene features a powerfully shaky follow-up shot; Paul Thomas Anderson's profoundly silent "opener" to "There Will Be Blood" heralds the director's critical exploration of American history.
Unlike these cinematic "rebirths" - these moments are not just some kind of turning point, but a stylistic and thematic expansion - in Alice Rohrwacher's film, such revelatory moments are not The beginning of the film, but the end. In the last two scenes of her film "Miracle" (2014), we see her transitioning from naturalism to worldly fantasy. The eldest daughter of the beekeeping family, young Jesomina, found the family's adopted son, Martin. We see the camera looking at the boy, stretched out, lying in a fire-lit cave. On the walls of the cave, we see the shadows of children, which may be Jesomina and Martin playing together. Then, the camera returns to the sleeping boy. In this simple camera movement, we see Rohr Wacher's beloved coming-of-age narrative transformed into a lyrical image-puzzle: through captivating writing about children's play in a Platonic cave, Martin learns from the story. Gone, and Jasomina is different — she's spent a lot of time in the film fighting over-burdening responsibilities and unattainable desires, and now she's finally attaining some sort of calm self-confidence.
In the next and final scene of "Miracle," we see Jesomina returning to her family's farm in a state of sudden maturity. Our young heroine meets all her family, even her parents' friend Keke. They were all huddled together on an outdoor mattress, which was not surprising at the time—in the post-hippie era, family organization was dynamic and society had a communal vibe. Jasomina becomes one of them, and Coco hints to her that there is "a secret" in the house for someone to discover in the future. Then, as the camera rolls back and forth between the scenes inside and outside the house, we see the camel that my father bought with a lot of money. Then we went back outside the house again - but by this time the family had disappeared. We only see the metal base, and the remnants of the house. Rohr Wacher uses one lens to capture two different historical periods. She mixes personal memories with a strong sense of loss - not the so-called "lost paradise", but the loss of herself cherished experiences and emotions.
The twists in the last two paragraphs of "Miracle" are unpredictable - in the penultimate scene we see the transition between the virtual and the real, the dream and the waking; in the last scene we see the past and the Switch now. These transitions have become a sort of revelatory expression, and they have also begun to characterize Rohr Wacher's style, as she seems interested in the dialectic between transition and stasis. Her first narrative film, Eucharist (2011), also tells the story of a metamorphosis: the transformation of a girl's body; a group of young people undergoing Christian baptism; a priest losing his faith. And in Lazzaro Happy, Rohr Wacher's third and best feature film, we see the parable of an angelic boy and a holy fool. He has traveled from the country to the city, from "sometime in the past" to the present, witnessing the continued marginalization, corrupt morals and poor people exploited by the establishment. However, his heart was "unstained out of the mud" and never changed. The film's divisive structure—the seeds of which were planted in the final two concluding shots of "Miracle"—promote the film's revolutionary spirit, which asks a simple But the pressing question: How did we stop embracing and praising the good and the beautiful? Why are we so?
In Rohr Wacher's new work, she takes a perspective from the past to the present. The "past" is an uncertain era in which an oppressed peasant community made a living by cultivating the land; the "now" is the contemporary Italian city, where there are clear class divisions. Both locations mark the "uncertain" character of Rohr Wacher's setting - a sense of ambiguity that leaves us wondering at which definite stage in history the sequence of events took place . The quaint, nineteenth-century architecture in the first half of "Lazzaro Bliss" reminds us of Hermano Olmi's "The Tree of Clogs." But when the Marchioness Anosina de Luna (Nicoletta Blaschi) spoils her child, Tancredi (Luka Chicovani, a pop singer and YouTuber) We have a sense of incongruity when using a mobile phone. The telephone used by Tancredi was also used by a priest in the original scene of the Eucharist.
In fact, Rohr Wacher, now 36, came up with the idea to shoot "Happy Lazzaro" when he remembered an article from his high school days. That article mentioned the tobacco farm of a noble family. Although the tenancy system had been abolished in Italy in the early 1980s, many years later the peasants on that farm were still deeply exploited by the nobility. In Rohr Wacher's setting, the creative sense of "uncertainty" leads the screen story to the contemporary urban landscape: in the film, the last big city Lazaro is in can be said to be A mix of Milan and Turin. In short, in Rohrwacher's point of view, the fusion of the past and the present creates a "stagnant Italy" - a land where people, in the name of faith and in the name of profit, continue to The eternal cycle of exploiting the bottom is being staged. It's certainly no coincidence that all three of Rohr Wacher's feature films begin with dark scenes. In those scenes, religious believers, hunters and peasants seem to wander and get lost in the silent night.
Rohr Wacher's names for his characters all have some kind of reference: Jasomina in "Miracle" reminds us of Fellini's "The Great Road"; Tancredi, also reminds us of the exiled soldier in Rossini's adaptation of Voltaire's opera "Tancredi". Of course, the name Lazaro adds a bit of a biblical allegory to the film, and "Happy Lazaro" is a variation on the story of Jesus saving Lazarus. Rohr Wacher's rewriting of the Bible "through time and space" is in line with her anti-dogmatic religious philosophy. Arguably, "Blissful Lazaro" is more of an experimental ballad than a gospel song. This film coincides with Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Noonday Development", both of which explore the possibility of fusion of reality and fantasy through the form of myth.
In Lazzaro Happy, Rohr Wacher transcends the naturalism that pervades previous works, making the film itself a kind of mystical creation. With the help of magical realism, Rohr Wacher liberates memory in a nostalgic mood. She also intensifies the extraordinary dynamism of her images through her use of sound and editing. In the field, the screeching voice calling for Lazaro's help, and the humming that came from nowhere, sonic embodies Rohr Wacher's unrealistic directorial approach. In "Happy Lazzaro," viewers may be hard-pressed to anticipate the montage between the sun-drenched and snow-splattered scenes. These edits, along with the fanciful, fanciful shots that follow, create a "fanatical" dichotomy that splits the film in two.
In Rohr Wacher's film, she poignantly points out that it is the emotional and moral emptiness that keeps real Italy in a sort of Debord "landscape". Director Guy Debord in his book "Society of the Spectacle") among the children's celebrations and rudimentary religious rites in "The Eucharist"; the talent show in "Miracle"; "The Happy Lazzaro" The outdated feudal fantasy in the first half, and the most disturbing, shameful modern slave market in the second half. In New York, when Rohr Wacher was asked about the contemporary social concerns of the film, she said: "What 'Lazaro of Happiness' is trying to show is... a situation that we can be aware of ourselves. It It starts with a reference to what our past was - when we were children of man, when we were young. When he fell off a cliff, we began to explore the relationship between the past and contemporary Italy, which is how my country has spent the last thirty what happened in 2010. I think there is some kind of past that isn't full of beautiful blooms, a past marked by abuse and exploitation, but also somehow connected to the present. When he fell off the cliff, Everything has changed; but the mechanics of how society works are the same. It's just that the peasants of the past are now being replaced by another form of slavery."
Rohr Wacher's analysis of the state does not contradict the form of comedy: the satirical tribute to Chaplin ("The Leisure Class") in "The Eucharist"; When the rebellious father, in just a pair of underwear, shouts against a gang of hunters, we can't help but think of Graham Chapman's clumsy performance in 'The Magic Star'; "Old Road": When Lazaro teaches the thief, played by Sercie Lopez, about edible plants by the railroad, he can't help but be amazed by Lazaro's "ancestral", natural wisdom.
The two pillars of friendliness and understanding, coupled with some rebellion against traditional film narratives, prop up the soul of "Happy Lazaro" that never easily resigns. Rohr Wacher has no interest in the sort of cynical trend that is prevalent in cinema today. With beautiful and moving images, she not only shows us the evils of contemporary society, but also gives us the emotional strength to defeat them.
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