Film Notes

La Chimera review – Alice Rohrwacher’s uproarious adventure teems with life.

Set in 1980s Tuscany, Rohrwacher’s captivating film follows a lovelorn Englishman plundering Italy’s historical artefacts with a bizarre gang.

Alice Rohrwacher’s new film is a beguiling fantasy-comedy of lost love: garrulous, uproarious and celebratory in her absolutely distinctive style. It’s a movie bustling and teeming with life, with characters fighting, singing, thieving and breaking the fourth wall to address us directly. As with her previous film Happy as Lazzaro, Rohrwacher homes in on a poignant sense of Italy as a treasure house of past glories, a necropolitan culture of ancient excellence. It can be plundered for the present day artefacts and spirits raised from the dead, but at the cost of incurring a terrible sadness: a feeling of surrounding yourself with ghosts.

The setting is Riparbella in Tuscany in the 1980s, and Josh O’Connor is tremendous as Arthur, a dishevelled Englishman in a grubby white suit sporting six-day stubble and a perennial cigarette. He is a former archeological scholar who has assumed the morose, slouching gait and coiled style of a gangster. When we first see him, he has just been released from an Italian prison. In the course of what were once his entirely respectable studies in this region, he befriended Flora, a local, ageing aristocrat in her vast, crumbling house (a lovely performance from Isabella Rossellini) and fell in love with her daughter Beniamina. But Beniamina is gone – dead, we understand – and Arthur’s agonised longing for her, his need to be reunited with her in the spirit world, has fused with his expertise into a criminal superpower. Using a dowsing rod, Arthur can tell where invaluable Etruscan antiquities are buried and has teamed up with a bizarre homeless gang of grave-robbers to dig them out under cover of darkness. They then sell them for a fraction of their worth to a shady dealer called Spartaco who can counterfeit the spurious provenance documents claiming that this loot is part of some prewar Italian family estates, with which they can be legally sold on for a fortune to foreign buyers.

These days, Arthur is living a squalid shantytown of corrugated iron sheets up in the hills and hanging out with this Fellini-esque platoon of grinning, squabbling, tomb-looting troubadours whose income comes theoretically from farming and entertaining the locals with their singing. On their tractor, they lead a parade through the local town on a feast day. But it is well known that they are part of the thriving hidden market in stolen antiquities; everyone is an expert thereabouts and in one hilarious moment, one character addresses the camera to say she loves the Etruscans for their sensitivity, and that their culture might have saved Italy from its machismo. Rohrwacher shows us that everyone here knows what the museum world does not know, or chooses not to know: that there is no such thing as an antiquity that isn’t stolen.

Everything comes to a crisis when Arthur finds himself with his dodgy crew at a local booze-up and there’s a glimmer of a new emotional connection with Italia (Carol Duarte), a young woman who was once Flora’s unpaid maid and singing pupil, fired for keeping two children secretly in the house. Just as this new romance looks like progressing, Arthur has a tingling; he and his mates start grubbing with their hands in the earth and Arthur starts to get that feeling Howard Carter had going into Tutankhamun’s tomb. Is this the big one? Or does Arthur, in his crazed grief, think it’s better than that; might he be reunited with Beniamina beyond this banal world of mortals?

La Chimera is a film that utterly occupies its own fictional space; it expresses its eccentric romance in its own fluent movie dialect. I was utterly captivated by this sad, lovelorn adventure.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 26th May 2023.

‘La Chimera’ Review: Josh O’Connor Is a Grave Robber Seeking More Elusive Treasure in Alice Rohrwacher’s Enchanting New Film.

The Italian director's latest matches the ethereal, between-worlds quality of 'The Wonders' and 'Happy as Lazzaro' to grittier realities.

In “La Chimera,” the ancient past nestles mere inches below the surface of the present, eventually breaking above ground and disrupting, if not the space-time continuum, the more mundane order of things. The borders between life and death feel similarly frictious and permeable, as if we could merely visit one from the other, as easily as sleeping and waking. Arthur (Josh O’Connor), the wandering Brit at the center of Alice Rohrwacher‘s marvelously supple and sinuous new film, is accustomed to such limbo states. So are admirers of Rohrwacher’s filmmaking, which, in this eccentric, romantic tale of competing grave-robbers in Central Italy, touches the transcendental without diving into the outright fabulism of 2018’s “Happy as Lazzaro.”

Grounding the feyer impulses of “La Chimera” — a return for Rohrwacher to more metaphysical musings after the simpler charms of her Oscar-nominated short “Le Pupille” — is, well, the literal ground: grubby and gritty and, in this region of Italy, packed with archaeological delights from the Etruscan era. Here, you can take a spade to just about any patch of land and, in minutes, uncover a literal wealth of millennia-old vases, utensils and ornaments. It is the early 1980s, and bands of tombaroli (illegal grave-robbers with an eye for an artefact) are cashing in, digging up once-sacred objects and selling them on to the elite ancient art market. What use are they underground, after all? The tombaroli are no more sentimental about the goods they dig up than a potato farmer is about his crop: It’s a living, and notwithstanding interference from the police and infighting among them, it’s an easier one than many.

Arthur, wonderfully played by O’Connor with a loping gait and a muttering command of Italian, is something of a lone-wolf tombarolo, occasionally collaborating with one particularly rowdy, raucous gang of thieves, but with a solitary mission and motives that he keeps close to his scrawny chest. In his cream-colored linen suit, he looks from a distance the very model of the rakish, slightly disreputable Englishman abroad — a suitably colonial image for a man extracting the treasures of a country not his own. Any glamor associated with that archetype evaporates, however, upon closer inspection of said suit. Crumpled and ill-fitting, with streaks of grime at the lapels that broaden and darken as the film progresses, it looks like it may have been plundered from a gravesite too.

Newly released from a short prison spell as the film opens, Arthur is adrift in Italy and in his own mind — his dreams and waking thoughts continually spliced with memories of Beniamina, the young, limpidly smiling Italian woman who once loved him, and who appears to be no more. He seeks refuge in the crumbling, fresco-adorned villa owned by her mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini, a joy), where she awaits her daughter’s return with an optimism not shared by Beniamina’s ghastly, grasping sisters — collectively eager to shuffle her off to a nursing home — and teaches classical singing to Italia (Carol Duarte, the Brazilian star of “Invisible Life”), a keen but tone-deaf waif who does domestic chores in exchange for her tuition.

Flora dotes on Arthur as a kind of proxy for her daughter, but he otherwise resists close human alliances, largely saving his heart for the absent or the dead. Though he falls in with Pirro (Vincenzo Nemolato), the gregarious ringleader of a particularly motley crew of tombaroli, and joins in their vaudeville-style carousing between digging expeditions, he gives away so little of himself as to be a pallid puzzle in their midst. Their divergent principles of thieving, meanwhile, come between them when they hit the Etruscan mother lode: a magnificent, fully intact Chimera statue worth inestimable millions. Only Italia, it seems, might just like Arthur for Arthur, but she too has his ghosts to compete with.

Shooting fluidly on multiple film formats — 35mm, 16mm and Super 16 — in the bleachy sky blues and earth tones that have by now become a signature palette, Rohrwacher and her regular DP Hélène Louvart make a virtue of this skittering, literally shape-shifting visual quality, as the shifts in grain, light and frame dimensions from one sequence to the next denote the film’s own transient sense of reality, and the states of earthy pragmatism and mournful reverie between which Arthur hovers. Is he sampling death every time he ventures underground, trying it on for size, at least until he finds something to live for above the surface? Is trading in the currency of the past a way to distance himself from a lonesome present?

Raffish and boyish at the same time — or switching between either mode as a cover for the other — O’Connor’s deft, droll performance implies such possibilities without sentimentalizing them. There’s a persistently stoic air to his stooping melancholy that only rarely gives way to a mischievous smile or a sudden, strident, slightly embarrassing flare of anger. His quiet curiosity as a performer makes him a good match for this somehow most generously elusive of filmmakers, who here offers all her earthly and otherworldly preoccupations in scattered, bejeweled fragments, for us to gather and assemble and interpret — and doesn’t much mind if some pieces stay buried.

Guy Lodge, Variety, May 26th 2023.