Worth: $19.00
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Cast:
Josh O’Connor, Carol Duarte, Isabella Rossellini, Alba Rohrwacher, Yile Yara Vianello
Intro:
Beautifully wrought and deeply mysterious, there is much to be discovered in Rohrwacher’s treasure of a movie.
La Chimera is a film all about history and yet, impressively, it never feels dusty or decrepit, perhaps because it shimmers with such hope, too. Director Alice Rohrwacher injects energy into the ancient by perpetually intertwining the old and the new. For example, the film’s gorgeous opening titles, painted to resemble an Etruscan fresco, are enlivened by the light of the cinema screen and later, a shipping container full of priceless relics is suspended by a massive crane.
Set in the nineteen-eighties, the film begins when English archaeologist Arthur (Josh O’Connor) travels to his former girlfriend Beniamina’s (Yile Yara Vianello) palatial but dilapidated Tuscan home. There, he reunites with her elderly mother Flora (played by an ever-wonderful Isabella Rossellini) and his tombaroli friends, a jovial crew of grave-robbers. Though Arthur is still enraptured by Beniamina, whose whereabouts are left ominously vague, a gentle romance sparks between him and Flora’s singing student-cum-servant, Italia (Carol Duarte).
Arthur, we learn, is wholly consumed by the past. With a preternatural gift for divining the location of buried tombs, he and his friends spend much of the film pillaging pits for statues, plates, pots and vases that they can sell to the slippery antiques dealer, Spartaco. Often captured waist-deep in a stranger’s grave wearing an ever-dirtier white linen suit, Arthur quite literally lives in the past.
O’Connor, it should be noted, is superb as this bedraggled, heartbroken thief, forever casting his lovelorn gaze over the ground in search of answers. Yet, Arthur’s moroseness is always countered by the eccentric humour of his rag-tag pals, desperate to score a big enough loot to start a new life. For the tombaroli, then, Tuscany’s hidden tombs represent boundless, yet-untapped opportunity.
Arthur is similarly hypnotised by his memories of Beniamina. He regularly recalls her in dreamy, granular bursts, shot in a pillarboxed aspect ratio to mimic Super 16 home videos. His nostalgic reveries blossom during his stay at Flora’s villa, her overgrown mansion, like Miss Havisham’s Satis House, haunted by an irretrievable past. However, while Arthur’s fantasies drag him back in time, Italia’s awkward, endearing charisma pulls him forward, flirtatiously teaching him Italian sign-language and kissing him in her kitchen. Their romance lends the narrative a peculiar but enthralling rhythm, the plot lurching and drifting with their budding relationship.
Like the Etruscan artefacts that adorn the film, La Chimera’s characters are at once achingly fragile and glimmering with possibility. Beautifully wrought and deeply mysterious, there is much to be discovered in Rohrwacher’s treasure of a movie.
