So this is an Alice Rohrwacher movie. Her first two movies, Corpo Celeste and The Wonders are very good, but if you’re being reductive, you could say that they’re fairly straightforward arthousey family/coming of age movies in the Italian countryside. (I think they’re better than that bland description makes them sound, but it’s not wrong.) But her third movie, Happy as Lazzaro, is doing something else entirely, in a less realistic mode, which I won’t spoil. (Go see it, it’s good, but go in blind.)

And so I wasn’t sure what this would be. And it starts in a way that doesn’t make it clear, either, with a scene that is ambiguously a flashback or a dream before our protagonist wakes up on a train with a few girls laughing at him.

(That dream/flashback sequence is filmed in a different aspect ratio, with a rough “film-like” border around the image. This is used for all the shots of this type, but the movie mixes up its aspect ratio in additional ways that had a less obvious pattern. There are a couple of other obtrusive effects-y things Rohrwacher does, like having a character directly address the camera at one point. But the most notable is that a few scenes run in fast motion, apparently intended to evoke silent film projected fast. I thought it worked reasonably well for these scenes — typically wide shots where people need to get from one point to another, and there’s no point drawing it out but a cut wouldn’t really work — but I did have a moment where I was like “oh shit, left it on 1.5x by mistake.”)

Despite those few moments of fast motion, the movie doesn’t rush along at all. Rohrwacher’s biggest skill as a director, to my mind, is finding little moments. There are shots that serve as grace notes, and scenes that aren’t necessary for any purpose other than to give the world and the film the kind of depth that comes from small details. (This is also why I say that I don’t think the bare description of her earlier films really captures them: They’re made up of these little moments, the things that would never show up in a synopsis.)

One consequence of that is that the film doesn’t immediately spell out its premise — you discover where it’s going gradually, such that I feel like even knowing the broad outlines of the story robs some of the early scenes of their intentionally ambiguous properties. Given that, and since this is a brand-new movie, I’m going to put the rest behind a spoiler cut, even though it’s just “read the one-paragraph blurb about the movie” level spoilers.

Spoilers

So it turns out that our guy on the train is a… well, the Italian term is “tombarolo,” and I’ve seen people translate it as “grave-robber” or “tomb raider,” but basically it amounts to looting archaeological treasures from ancient graves, which Italy is apparently riddled with. He’s just gotten out of jail after being caught during a previous excursion; he’s meeting back up with his friends, and (seemingly reluctantly) getting back out to the tombs for more raiding.

The movie does tell a relatively straightforward story about this; but it’s also doing other things. There’s an old woman who lives in a decaying estate, apparently the mother of his… dead? vanished?… girlfriend; there’s her pupil/assistant, who ends up having her own story of sorts; there’s the other tombaroli, and the various figures they interact with.

And running underneath it all, in more senses than one, is a sense of the numinous. This movie is mostly in a realistic mode… except when it’s very much not.

This digression into a mythic mode was jarring at first, but I think it works. The film takes a sharply-observed and interesting bunch of characters, puts them in a setting that melds together a gorgeous Italian landscape with depressing rural poverty realism; and then adds to it a layer of the unreal that imbues everything with just a little more meaning and ambiguity.

This is a good movie. I’m still ruminating on it, so I’m not sure precisely where it’s going to land for me — at the moment, I think Lazzaro is tentatively still my favorite movie of hers — but it’s at least up there with Rohrwacher’s best, which is very good indeed.