“Human beings are like animals: set them free and they realise they are slaves, locked in their own misery. Right now they suffer, but they don’t know,” says Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna (Nicoletta Braschi), owner of a tobacco farm in central Italy in the early 1980s. The Marchesa (better known as “the Cigarette Queen” of the village of Inviolata) might well be right about her exploited, unpaid workers’ ignorance; they don’t realise sharecropping is considered slavery. Yet the Marchesa couldn’t be more wrong about the labourers’ misery, not least the cherubic Lazzaro (new discovery Adriano Tardiolo).
Fetch grandma, grab that hen, make coffee; he pliantly obliges every order that is barked at him. Yet his inherent goodness is not presented as a weakness but instead, essential to survival. Lazzaro drifts through the film’s two halves like a displaced angel, docile green eyes mesmerised by his changing surroundings or else “staring into the void again”. French cinematographer Hélène Louvart shoots in honeyed 16mm, capturing backlit strands of hay that fall like snow as the bales are loaded into a shredder.
The third feature from Italian film-maker Alice Rohrwacher (Corpo Celeste, The Wonders) leaps across timelines and genres, sliding from neorealist tradition into magic realism at the film’s midpoint. The less revealed about the specifics of this shift, the more pleasurable its strangeness, though I will say that part two, which grounds the action in a modern-day industrial slum, is even more magical and melancholy than the opening half’s out-of-time pastoral setting. Rohrwacher’s eye for gestures is revealing of class, pride, humour, and values. The care with which wild chicory growing in a car park is harvested is given its moment; a tray of the city’s prettiest and most unaffordable pastries is a deferent act of generosity. When Lazzaro and his comrades are kicked out of a church service, the music miraculously follows them. Inviolata is Italian for “unspoiled”, and the word could apply to its people as much as their straw-gold land.
