in Italian. With Adriano Tardiolo.

Lazzaro works harder than anyone around him, it seems.  The Italian tobacco farm that employs him and dozens of workers has them harvest the leaves, load the trucks, bundle the sheaves, tend to the threshers, and do labor I associate with 19th century practice.  Lazzaro’s face is open, his eyes wide in their innocent, non judgmental gaze, and he responds to each demand with uncomplaining action. The first word spoken in the movie is his name, summoning him to play a bagpipe as a fellow worker serenades his love.   Lazzaro is beatific, saintly, not like any of the other more worldly, even cruel people surrounding him.

Some of the women are so cruel they make fun of a baby for needing his mother and tease him by saying that she killed herself she was so tired of him . How much more mean spirited can you be?  Well, there are other examples in this movie, ones that are not so much shocking, as outrageous in contrast to the humble, uncomplaining, always helpful behavior of Lazzaro.

Wolves threaten the livestock, much like predatory business practices.  An overseer totals the wages due, but then subtracts things such as livestock killed by wolves, and the workers end up with a negative balance.  The movie points out how people are constantly exploiting each other in an endless power struggle where little progress can be made.  But then there is Lazzaro, simple and saintly, agreeing to help whoever asks him, even if it is thieves.

His simple friendship with the Marquesa’s son threatens Lazzaro’s safety because Tancredi is much more practiced in the wiles of those living in privilege. 

There is a remarkable sense of place at Inviolata where the farm workers live.  As the film begins, the workers seem out of time, linked to medieval peasants yet there are clues that the time is the early 1990s when cell phones were new and it was hard to get a signal.  The rugged hills, ravines, and everyone living under one roof as in a great dormitory lend an air of  timelessness to the story.  For how many centuries have laborers been taken advantage of by rapacious business owners? 

Later in the story, migrants compete for work by reducing their prices to something less than a living wage.  So the movie covers several time periods, jumping ahead, yet Lazzaro remains miraculously unchanged.  Or is he even real?  The vanishing act that occurs mid film hints at why we are wondering when the film takes place.  Suddenly everyone is twenty years older.  Times have changed.

The director Alice Rohrach’s visual mastery and expert storytelling with elements of magical realism at key moments kept me on the edge of my seat to find out what would happen next.  She has assembled an ensemble cast, and directed a fine treatment of a saint for all times.