LA CHIMERA

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

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.
Perpetually dressed in a crumpled linen suit, Arthur, played by Josh O’Connor is a former archaeologist recently out of jail who makes his living by heeding the call of Etruscan artifacts buried deep within the Italian landscape. 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. The procurement of antiquities forms its own underground economy, offering a vision of 1980s Tuscany where everyone's gaze is fixed on the commodification of the past for present profit. Even so, mercenary intent isn't all, and melancholy hangs over the protagonist as he yearns for a lost love and interrogates his role in the grave-robbing trade.
Shot in beautiful 16mm by Hélène Louvart, La Chimera is the kind of film whose tactility is so acute one feels like it's possible to reach out and graze the pictured textures, be it the wet soil cradling Etruscan treasures or Josh O'Connor's scruffy chin. Such palpable qualities help set the stage for a final descent into magical realism when yesterday's spirits come a-calling, and we're reminded how, one day, the earth beneath our feet shall be our resting place. What, at first, might seem like meandering absurdities escalates to a poignant ending. Suddenly, every one of Rohrwacher's ideas slips into place, emotional clarity overwhelming as La Chimera breathes its last breath.