Streaming on Disney+ - Rod Bishop finds much to admire in the film-making of Alice Rohrwacher, including the recent LE PUPILLE (2022, Italy/USA)

  

Alice Rohrwacher and Alfonso Cuarón

After the magic realism and rural working-class exploitation of her third feature Happy as Lazzaro (2018), Alice Rohrwacher returned to the children and female adolescents of her first two features.

Le Pupille (2022), a 38-minute short produced by Alfonso Cuarón, set in a Catholic orphanage during World War Two was nominated for an Oscar in 2023.

The orphan girls in Le Pupille just wanna have fun, but are subjected to a religiously inspired disciplinary regime led by a particularly nasty nun (Alba Rohrwacher). She labels one girl as “wicked” and the softly spoken student responds by inspiring her classmates to rebel. 

Le Pupille

Children’s stories are, by and large, disguised lessons in morality. But here, there’s a deliberate avoidance of any moral teaching and if the audience is missing this intention, the girls are happy to burst into song, singing straight to camera to tell us the film has no moral perspective. 

It takes only a couple of minutes with Rohrwacher’s first feature Heavenly Bodies (2011) to realize her filmmaking talents were fully-formed from the very start of her career. 

As was her view of Italian Catholicism, and she follows the 13-year-old Marta, living in rural poverty and suffering through her training for Communion – both as a supplicant raising her head for a blessing and as a prisoner transitioning from the wonders and innocence of her childhood to the expectations of her gender role in adult life.

Heavenly Bodies

In The Wonders (2014), the 14-year-old Gelsomina resolutely struggles with the love and responsibilities she feels for her rural working-class bee-keeper family, yet experiences a desire to outgrow this narrow world and experience ‘the beyond’. She transgresses by secretly joining her family up as contestants in a reality TV show based around peasants who still live like Etruscans, those mysterious peoples whose civilization and language disappeared into the formation of the Roman Empire. 

The Etruscans are even more central to Rohrwacher’s fourth feature La Chimera, based around the tombaroli, contemporary Italian graverobbers who fall into conflict with the capitalistic, international art market. In both films, Etruscan art is presented as wondrous, spell-binding, enriching - indicating a world of marvel beyond the confines of rural poverty.

The girls and female adolescents are replaced by the man-child Lazzaro in Happy as Lazzaro (2018). Perhaps ‘somewhere on the spectrum’, Lazzaro lives in an impoverished rural community of indentured labourers growing tobacco for down-at-heel, titled nobility. They are out of time and place, but discovered by an astonished carabinieri. 

Josh O'Connor, La Chimera

Used as a compliant slave by his community, Lazzaro’s childlike innocence and sense of pragmatic wonder at the natural world belies his true age. Accidently dying, but woken by a wolf, Lazzaro resurrects decades later and searches for what’s left of his community, some of whom kneel down and venerate him like a saint.

It’s the same religious divinity, magical realism and ancient worlds that her girls and female adolescents reach out for in Heavenly Bodies, The Wonders and Le Pupille.

It’s Rohrwacher’s distinctive world where she focuses on her main characters as they transition from their wondrous childhoods into the rigors and disappointments of adult life.

My viewing partner describes Rohrwacher as “a visionary with a courageous sense of conviction, her films all delivered with a light-handed exultation”.