This is the best movie of 2018 (that I’ve seen, and I notably haven’t seen a bunch of very well-regarded movies), and I recommend it strongly. It’s on Netflix, so it’s easy to get to, and it’s also very spoiler-able so be careful googling reviews or whatever. It’s an Italian movie, which means subtitles; the S&S blurb for it describes it as “a boldly unsentimental tale of a holy innocent, an inexplicable miracle and a tyrannous aristocrat.”

If that sounds at all interesting to you, skip this post and put it on your to-watch list. If you don’t really care, but also want to read about a movie you’re not going to watch, well, keep reading.

Massive spoilers

So as the movie starts out, it’s in very familiar territory, right. We’re watching these peasant farmers living in a sort of timeless rural poverty — living with large extended families in a house, with few clothes or personal possessions, working away at their subsistence farming. And as much as it is poverty, the people aren’t unhappy; romances bloom among the young people, they have wine that they make themselves, and various simple happinesses, right.

But for all that, it’s pretty clear that the marchesa who taxes(?) the village is pretty exploitative, and there’s some inklings of revolt (in particular one of the young couples wants to move away to try life in the city and are not happy that they are very expressly forbidden to leave)… and the marchesa’s son, in a fit of teenage pique, decides to sympathize with the villagers in a half-assed way, and runs off to hide in the countryside with one of the village boys (the titular Lazzaro, who is also the “holy innocent” mentioned in that blurb) and pretend to be kidnapped.

And at this point, there are some discordant notes. Like, he has a cell phone? Which seems very at odds with this kind of old-fashionedy rural peasant lifestyle. And so when he calls his marchesa mother saying that the kidnappers are threatening him, his young sister answers the phone, is scared, and calls the police.

… who come in in a helicopter, and are (along with the viewer) all like WHAT THE FUCK because it turns out that it’s basically like 1999 or something and uh holy shit this “marchesa” has been mole-womaning these villagers and none of this is legal at all — there’s no school for the kids, sharecropping isn’t a thing anymore, etc. So they get evacuated out of there and remanded to idk like Italian social services ‘n’ stuff.

And oh btw, while this is happening, Lazzaro had a fever, and then fell off a cliff to his apparent death… but (and here’s the miracle part) he didn’t die; and so when he wakes up, things are confusing at first, but it eventually becomes clear to the viewer that it’s like 20 years later; he makes his way to the city and ends up meeting up with a family of the former villagers, who are living in desperate urban poverty, engaging in petty theft and con jobs just to stay alive. (They read the newspaper account of their “rescue” proudly to him — it’s framed and they’ve clearly memorized it — as this is always going to be the most notable and exciting thing in their lives.)

And so this is really the heart of the movie, the contrast between their old lives in the village and their new lives in the city, and it’s clearly a stark social commentary — for all that we’re so much richer now than we were back when people really did live in villages like that; and for all that these people are no longer exploited with cruel personal intentionality, it’s not clear that anything is really better for them. (But also not clear that it’s not.)

The movie plays around with this a while (and Lazzaro meets up with the marchesa’s son again, who is every bit as feckless as he was back then), before ultimately ending in a kind of magical realist tragedy.

The mystical “holy innocent” part doesn’t totally work for me on its own — it’s hard to really give a shit about a cipher like Lazzaro (which removes a lot of the potential emotional punch of the ending) — but as a plot device to explore the contrast between the villagers in their youth and as older adults in the city, it works well; and between the “holy shit” moment of the revelation about the village, and then the way that the film teases out its social commentary in a sympathetic, humanist, and non-didactic way, there’s a lot here to like.