It seems fairly obvious to me that Tancredi is named after the opportunistic nephew in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's 1958 novel The Leopard, famously made into a film a few years later by Luchino Visconti with the character of Tancredi played by Alain Delon. When his name was mentioned first in the cinema, it got an audible chuckle from another cinephile in the audience.
For those who prefer their Italian neorealism without any magic, it would be good to recall the scene in Bicycle Thieves where, upon leaving the fortune teller, they immediately bump into the thief.
... and for those interested in Neopolitan history, look into the history of the Naples Lazzaroni.
Even at its most fatalistic, the old neo-realism was grounded in an idea of progress, in the leftist faith that after feudal paternalism and capitalist predation a better, more humane future could be imagined and struggled toward. The eclipse of that faith has had consequences for politics and also for narrative: If history is a chronicle of one form of injustice after another, the possibility of a happy ending, or an ending of any kind, seems permanently foreclosed.
— A. O. Scott (The New York Times)
The movie wafts about on its own whims and seems like it might dematerialize at any moment. It’s as if a mid-century work of Italian neorealism took a nap in a field and had a dream.
Tardiolo [as Lazzaro] is an incredible discovery, projecting the blank innocence common to the at once awkward and naturalistic nonprofessional actors who often appeared in Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s religious and historically revisionist films.[…]
[The] change in time and place offers expanded possibilities for the film’s strange brand of comedy, but Rohrwacher simply doubles down on her view of laborers as a perpetually exploited class […]. Still, Happy as Lazzaro is one of the sharper, and funnier, recent films to reckon with the injustices of class disparities, and its smartest joke is centering its satire on its hyperbolically innocent protagonist, whose Candide-like naïveté makes him the object of fascination and reflexive resentment of nearly everyone he meets.
— Jake Cole (Slant Magazine)
The screenplay, at [the turning] point, is only about halfway through, and while Rohrwacher executes the shift with total fluency, it is nevertheless still difficult to think of a more radical narrative handbrake turn in recent cinema.[…]
The poor farming class in Lazzaro are shown as kind and honourable but also gullible and understandably uneducated, too. This might come across as somewhat condescending were it not for the fact that Rohrwacher portrays them with such tremendous warmth as to suggest that Italy should be ashamed for forgetting these people. Indeed, the message of her boundless, beautiful new film might be that Italy is these people.
— Rory O'Connor (The Film Stage)
Synopsis: Purehearted teen Lazzaro is content living as a sharecropper in rural Italy, but an unlikely friendship with the marquise’s son will change his world.