Adriano Tardiolo in Happy as Lazzaro (Netflix)

 Critics praise. Critics damn. And in silence, critics gnash their teeth that a thrilling and critically lauded movie like Widows is stumbling at the box office. Depth, desperate characters, and biting social commentary combined with fiery car gangster chases—what more could America want? Well, Widows is all about women, after all, so maybe that’s why the grosses are mired in nowheresville. As the Huffington Post laments about the movie, this is why we can’t have nice things.

Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro is another great (though quite different) film possibly doomed to be unseen by the public, although a pickup by Netflix may pull in curious viewers. Still, many may be left bewildered. Like Widows, Happy as Lazzaro is hard to classify—part mythical “Rip van Winkle” or Candide, part knowing satire of an Italy where exploitation adopts different forms but never completely goes away, all with a touch of neorealism. This unpredictable but always absorbing film is clearly marked by a woman’s sensibility, something America may not always respond to (see Widows).

The movie’s first half is taken up with the struggles of a sharecropping clan who appear to be living in the 1980s, and in a strange feudal limbo of homespun clothes, crude farm machinery, and bagpipe courtship serenades harkening back to the days when man had only sheep, the stars, and God for company. The lost-in-time families toil on the farming estate of the imperious Marchesa Alfonsina di Luna (Nicoletta Braschi), who likes to muse aloud that her charges can’t handle freedom and deserve slavery.

It takes a while for the film’s main character to emerge. Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo), the clan’s teenage dogsbody, silently works away, blue eyes wide open. This sweet, trusting character strikes up a submissive friendship with the Marchesa’s whip-thin, bleached-blond son (Georgian pop-culture gadfly Luca Chikovani), who rebels against Mamma and hides out in the mountains like an Italo Calvino character. Around them evil swirls: a blood moon, a wolf, and a venal overseer. The air throbs with the sense of something about to happen.

And it does, with a bizarre transfiguration that propels Lazzaro into the future: contemporary Italy, where he emerges a confused stranger in a strange land. Again, it will take some time, but Lazzaro will identify and reunite with characters from his past life. While he remains beautiful and ageless, his old pals have grown up sordid, worming their way into Italy’s tainted ecosystem of scams, squatting, fake antiques, and empty flattery. How will saintly Lazzaro make his way in such a sleazy, cutthroat world?

Director Rohrwacher somehow manages to make a fantastical tale cohere—although it’s touch and go—and stay compelling. Casting an unworldly figure as a central character is a gamble that pays off, as the film abides by a very Italian love for holy fools (balanced by winking admiration for grifters who live by their wits). Mockery of the film’s odd birds is lightened by humor and tenderness and given depth by sorrow. These touches of real emotion and street smarts put Rohrwacher miles ahead of fellow satirists Nanni Moretti and Paolo Sorrentino—they should have some of what she’s having.

Lazarus was the biblical figure who came back from the dead, and viewers may see Happy as Lazzaro as a religious allegory, a magic-realism/time-travel saga or a social critique damning the never-ending human impulse to cheat and demean others. It is all of those things. More than that, it’s a backhanded love letter to the spirit of love and trust that lives alongside the blackness of the heart. See this odd, courageous, beautiful movie with friends. Between Lazzaro and Widows, you will have lots to talk about.