Keep Your Dreams Alive: Lazzaro felice, Authoritarian Liberalism, and the Slow Death of Progress in the Italian Second Republic

Abstract

This article considers Lazzaro felice (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018) as counter-history to the neoliberal takeover of the modern Italian state. Specifically, it argues the film’s characters serve as witnesses to an authoritarian liberalist hijacking of democracy, the logical endpoint of which is a return to fascism. This reading will be contextualized against the seemingly perpetual cycle of economic and political crises that beset Italy from the establishment of the Second Republic in 1994 to the election of Giorgia Meloni in 2022, positing that the resurgence of the far right has been facilitated by a deliberate, technocratically executed separation of economic and democratic spheres, a process that Lazzaro addresses in both its content and its form. The eponymous Lazzaro, in this reading, emerges as a Benjaminian Angel of History, one who wants to warn us about the impending disaster but keeps getting blown off track by the neoliberal storm we call progress.