Rent La Chimera (2023)

Another sophisticated and absorbing work from Alice Rohrwacher - La Chimera review by PD

Alice Rohrwacher's extraordinary, quirky work ventures into Italy’s labyrinthine past through pocket communities, vanishing breeds that seem suspended in time. In The Wonders, it was a family of beekeepers; in Happy as Lazzaro, it was isolated sharecroppers; and in La Chimera, it’s a ragtag band of 'tombaroli', grave-robbers who dig up Etruscan relics and make their money selling those antiquities on to fences who in turn sell them to museums and collectors for (of course) vastly larger sums.

The three films make up an informal trilogy about the delicate thread between life and death, present and past. The latter remains very much alive almost everywhere you look in Italy, an ancient spectre with a long reach extending into contemporary life. That temporal duality, as in the earlier films, informs the enveloping sense of place. Rohrwacher makes films we sink into rather than watch dispassionately, taking time to establish the milieu as her characters and stories reveal themselves in layers. It's a film laced with nods not just to ghosts rooted in the story but to Italian cinema’s illustrious past — most notably with Pasolini, but also early Fellini, Ermanno Olmi and the Taviani Brothers, among others.

The title refers to unattainable dreams and illusory promises, which for these looters of history is the prospect of striking it rich with one major find that will set them all up for life. The chimera of the Englishman Arthur (Josh O’Connor) is Beniamina, the woman he loved and lost, who haunts his dreams. The tombaroli regard Arthur as a kind of mystic, able to locate fruitful spots to dig with a forked tree branch that serves as a divining rod, the force of each find seemingly sapping his strength. It's a wonderful part for the very gifted O’Connor: dressed for much of the film in a cream linen suit that’s grubby and rumpled, like a gentleman archaeologist or a continental traveller gone to seed, Arthur lives among the plants and trees in a makeshift shanty on the town’s ancient walls. He’s at home among the carousing bunch of grave-robbers, but also stuck in his own head, fixated less on the wealth to be found underground than the mythological entryway to the afterlife, where he might reconnect with Beniamina.

Rohrwacher injects silent comedy notes by using jumpy fast-motion in scenes with the grave-robbers being chased by carabinieri and inverts frames to alter our perspective. She gets creative mixing up music choices, from Monteverdi and Mozart to Kraftwerk electro-pop and Italian rock, and there’s also a woozy dream-beauty to intermittent stretches of the film that suggests a passage between two worlds. That suspended state resonates with most poignancy in O’Connor’s affecting performance, floating between open-heartedness and fatalism, between the comforting escape of dreams and the sadness of reality. Whether Arthur will let go of the past or find a path into it is the film’s big mystery.

One of the key themes La Chimera considers is who owns the past. Unlike the fearful Italia, the tombaroli believe everything left behind is fair game, regarding the Etruscans as naïve in thinking that treasures so easily unearthed would stay put. But ownership even in the present is revealed to be a tenuous thing as we see evidence that the grave-robbers are just lowly links in a chain, cheap labour in a greed-driven market. Of course, future generations all carry the past in one form or another, passing it on like an heirloom or hand-me-down garment. But when what’s carried is a shared cultural history with no intended forebear, does it automatically become everyone’s, or no one’s? The film could perhaps be accused of being ultimately a little too whimsical to provide serious answers, but nevertheless this is sophisticated and absorbing stuff.

Absorbing but overlong - La Chimera review by CD

Definitely a 4 star film for the first 60 mins but the film loses direction and it is very long. The casting is great and the locales and quirkiness introduced into many scenes really works well. Josh O'Connor puts in a great performance and I like the avoidance of easy cliches in the plot, and in the relationships within the film. I am sufficiently impressed to seek out other films by this director and those involving the lead actors from this one.