“EVERYONE EXPLOITS EVERYONE else,” Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna, the ‘Queen of Cigarettes’, as she is known in the movie, tells her son, defending her decision to confine a group of sharecroppers to a distant village and keep them in perennial debt. “I exploit them, they exploit that poor man. It is a chain reaction that cannot be stopped,” she explains her philosophy.
The son, Tancredi, points to a young man and asks his mother if he exploits someone else, too, and she claims that even the poor young man, who is ordered around by the peasants, is part of the chain. But he is not. Lazzaro is gentle, kind and hardworking. Tancredi, who resents his mother and the feudal structure she perpetuates, strikes a friendship with Lazzaro. He even calls him his half-brother after Lazzaro confesses that his grandmother is his only kin. Lazzaro takes the title seriously, and when Tancredi decides to stage his own kidnapping, he becomes a willing accomplice. Directed by Alice Rohrwacher, the movie, which won the award for best screenplay at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, is a perfect blend of fantasy, friendship and a social commentary on the nature of the exploiter and the exploited.