Do you think that Lazzaro’s openness to others and his passivity is the only way to be happy?
No, absolutey not. I don’t think that we must be happy. The film is not about ‘being’ happy, but about ‘seeing’ happy, which are two very different sentiments. One is a search for adolescent empathy for the character, as though the film told us to be like him. But there’s another mode of spectatorship, where the character is instead something that we have to watch and remember. Perhaps the memory of Lazzaro’s innocence is both painful and pleasant because it’s an original yearning, something from which we’ve been separated but which we remember.
Lazzaro never changes; the world changes around him. We often imagine that a good man does good, but it’s an illusion. A real good man doesn’t know what is good or bad, he’s simply open to everything, without a filter. Lazzaro is a mystery and a form of gentle revolution. A script is often seen as something to dominate, but here I admit that there are few Lazzaros and I watch him like I would watch a saint, or a tree.
I don’t think it’s Lazzaro’s point of view, but rather that of the world on Lazzaro. He is sometimes embarrassing because he shows us something that, deep inside, we recognize in ourselves too, but we pretend not to. We are embarrassed when someone sings badly because maybe we don’t sing well either. We’re embarrassed by things that we participate in but that we hide.
For me, it was very important to talk about things that, in the past, have remained in the past but aren’t solved. My way of looking at the past is by no means nostalgic, but not at all a rhetorical kind of looking at the past either. It’s not something gone and therefore we miss it. It’s something that hasn’t been solved. I felt that we no longer have time because the world changes quickly. Therefore, it’s not like I could talk about this at a later stage. Now is the time to make this movie. It’s true, people migrate because they’re escaping from big deception. There are people that are responsible for this deception, made their lives ugly, deceived them without solving the issues [that made them migrate] - and, actually, confounding them. Therefore, this kind of meaning, which in a way could be a bit rhetorical and boring - we go beyond that. And the reason we manage not to fall into this trap is that we have this [Lazzaro’s] gaze, the gaze of a child, which is somewhat lighthearted.
He [the actor] approached it as if he [Lazzaro] was a window, not a wall […] This sort of strange sanctity without miracies is something which, in the past, he had a role of the person we exploit. In the present, it can generate fear and scare us because he’s no longer the person we exploit. How did we pull that off? We pulled that off because the story is a fable or fairy tale, so you have a clear-cut distinction between the good guy and bad guy with no ambiguity there […] In the movie, he has a line where he says he doesn’t know who his parents are and who he is - that is true. I didn’t know all these things, so there was no higher power who knew all these things. We say that he was found under a cabbage, and that’s what he wanted, and we respected his wishes.
Lazzaro Felice (2018) dir. Alice Rohrwacher
Alice Rohrwacher Slant Magazine: the Past in the Present Tense, 2018.
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