As Köhler stated in his 2007 essay for the German site new filmkritik, “Why I Don’t Make Political Films,” he would never ask his audience to unearth any meaning behind his choice to illustrate a particular fate for his characters. So is there a reason that Lazzaro and Armin are singled out? In the harsh reality that Köhler presents, Armin could be anyone - there’s no grand design. Being anachronistic has its benefits if time is no longer an issue.
What might be considered failings in one world could be construed as successes in another. For Armin and Lazzaro, two characters who seem out of step with their own generations, this is particularly compelling.
He attempts to stay, enchanted by its pastoral ways.īeyond the ethical and scientific considerations, on the individual level, it’s tempting for one imagine how we’d fare in another era. Then there’s the possibility of jumping through time, as dramatized in Vincente Minnelli’s 1954 musical “Brigadoon,” in which Gene Kelly’s character stumbles upon a village in Scotland that preserves itself by only coming alive once every 100 years. His initial shock gives way to glee when he stumbles upon a library teeming with his favorite novels, only to be trumped by fate when his glasses break. The popular 1959 “Twilight Zone” episode “Time Enough at Last” introduced the character of Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith), a bookworm bank-teller and lone survivor of an H-bomb explosion. The idea of stopping time has long interested artists, survivalists, and occultists. So when, he’s inexplicably transported to present-day Italy following his seeming death without having aged at all, he brings a little bit of Inviolata with him. He usually requires some shaking to return back to Earth. While all of the workers exist in a skewed version of reality, Lazzaro is perhaps one more layer removed, often found “staring into the void,” as his fellow workers call it. Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo) is the personification of Inviolata - innocent, taken advantage of, purposely cut off from time. The “Marquise” (Nicoletta Braschi) who runs the farm has kept her staff ignorant to life on the outside as indentured servants. In reality, Inviolata has simply been purposely hidden away from the rest of the world and its movement towards modernity. With its old-world traditions and wardrobe that looks straight out of an Italian neorealist film, the village seems to firmly exist in pre-industrial times. The film opens in a bucolic Italian tobacco farm called Inviolata. In Alice Rohrwacher’s “ Happy as Lazzaro,” which also screened at this year’s New York Film Festival, another young man is given a second chance at life, but this time within the framework of magical realism. While initially a bleak, hyper-realist look at this extreme scenario, Armin eventually realizes that the world is a blank page on which he can finally rewrite his own story. The 40 Best LGBTQ Movies of the 21st CenturyĪs Armin roams around his desolate neighborhood in the wake of an unexplained and uneventful apocalypse (there’s no explosion, flood, or famine that we witness), he realizes that time has stopped only for him, and that humanity has vanished.
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A broke deadbeat with nothing left to lose, Armin finally has everything to gain when the world ends a third of the way through the film, leaving him seemingly alone on Earth. The film’s title (presented in English) likely references the Beach Boys’ 1963 song of the same name: “There’s a world where I can go/And tell my secrets to/In my room.” The use of the song title hints at the desire to press “pause” on life as we know it and simply exist - alone. “Good thing we didn’t miss that,” someone mistakenly says in the background. Just as a politician is about to speak, the image and sound cut out. A cameraman, later revealed to be our middling protagonist Armin (Hans Löw), has mixed up his on and off buttons, leaving footage of a conference with all the meat missing. The following essay was produced as part of the 20 18 NYFF Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring film critics that took place during the 56th edition of the New York Film Festival.įrom the beginning of Ulrich Köhler’s “ In My Room,” the timing is already off.
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