A beautiful and complex movie whose politics are suspect: Happy as Lazarro

Alice Rohrwacher's 2018 Italian-language drama, Happy as Lazarro, is a fine, entertaining, moving, and thought-provoking film of European provenance and available exclusively on Netflix (not sure if it's ever been shown in a U.S. theater). In essence the film is about a community of some 60 farm laborers - men, women, children - who indentured servants, slaves practically, working a tobacco-growing estate in the remote mountains in Italy, virtually cut off from the modern (ca 1995) world. The workers are horribly exploited by the so-called Marquise, but her enterprise is threatened as the world is turning against tobacco products, what a shame. The central figure is the eponymous Lazarro, who seems to have significant mental disabilities and is thus the butt of jokes and the one given all the dirty work among the clan of workers. Ultimately, the Marquise's son, Tancredi, a rebel and an outsider in his family, befriends - sort of - Lazarro and exploits him even worse that his mother exploits the farm workers. Up to the half-way point the film seems a lot like the well-known Tree of Wooden Clogs, a look at exploited, communal agricultural labor - and there are probably other such films as well - but Rohrwacher makes a sudden shift into a kind of allegorical story line as something dramatic and unexpected - No spoilers - happens to L., and we then jump some 20 or so years into the present, where L. joins a group of the farm workers who living hand-to-mouth in a semi-criminal manner on a rail siding in an industrial city in North Italy. It's not entirely clear how this film lines up politically and culturally: Clearly, through the first half our sympathies are entirely with the exploited farm workers; but once they're freed from their servitude their conditions seem even worse and their lives less communal and less ethical. Why did none of the children benefit from a public education? Why did none of the adults, aided by public welfare and housing, presumably, get on their feet and get real jobs? The sense is almost that they were better off and more productive in their enslavement. Whether or not that's AR's intention, one has to feel that the politics of the movie are selective and dubious at best - but it's still worth watching and worth thinking about, in particular trying to figure out the significance of the mysterious, cryptic central figure.