Alice Rohrwacher: The Abstractness of Lazzaro

By analysing the structures of Alice Rohrwacher’s films, it can be shown that they form a unity of content. Heavenly Body (Corpo celeste, 2011) and The Wonders (Le meraviglie, 2014) pose a question that remains unanswered because the magic element that would enable them to break through their narrative horizon is missing. The answer can be found in Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro felice, 2018), which, on the one hand, solves the riddle by introducing its abstract protagonist, but, on the other, also shows the pretentiousness of the question, which enables the establishment of the serial.

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