La Chimère

"La Chimera" is a beautiful, ethereal film about an expert relic hunter (played by Josh O'Connor) who's haunted by the death of his love.

As the movie starts, he's recently been released from jail, and he reluctantly reteams with his old gang, a group of petty criminals who dig up old gravesites for treasure and then sell it on the black market. It's a very specific premise about something I know nothing about -- I didn't even know that this was a thing in Italy. But the emotions felt by the various characters in the movie are universal enough that anyone can relate despite the film's esoteric plot.

It's a meandering movie that may be too slow for some tastes, but I enjoyed it the way I would enjoy sitting in a sunny garden on a warm, drowsy day listening to an old-timer relate some fascinating stories from their past. It has that kind of quality to it.

And though I usually resist magical realism, the ending of this film almost took by breath away.

Grade: A.

Arthur, the disheveled former archaeologist turned Etruscan tomb-finder, is a man on a quest. When we first meet him, he is dreaming on a train heading home after being released from prison. Once home, he soon falls in with his old gang of tombaroli (grave-robbers) and they're on the search for treasure in the earth. For the rest of the gang, treasure means loot from Etruscan tombs; Arthur seems to be searching for something else. We get clues to Arthur's search in recurring images of a young woman and her red thread first seen in the opening shots of the film. The woman, we soon learn, is Beniamina, the daughter of Flora and Arthur's beloved. Flora lives in a crumbling palazzo with Italia, her singing student, and a group of women who call Flora mother. Italia is being exploited as a servant by Flora, who believes she is tone-deaf, but Italia in turn is raising two children in the house unbeknownst to Flora. The film juxtaposes these two kinds of groups: the rival groups of tombaroli led by men and the communal groups led by women (Italia forms the second group in a disused railway station), which echoes the remark early in the film that Italy would be much less macho today if the Etruscans had beaten the Romans rather than the other way around.

The film is full of mythic and historical resonances. Arthur is a latter-day Orpheus searching for his Eurydice (the first musical cue is from Monteverdi's Orfeo), but without Orpheus's gift of music. The red thread recalls Ariadne and the labyrinth. Flights of birds (and ominous pigeons) follow Arthur. Italia's first language is Portuguese and her children are of many ethnicities. And so on. In the hands of a lesser director or screenwriter this hybrid creature of different parts (you might call it a chimera) could have been a mess, but here everything seems to cohere and to create a mythic world that resembles our own, but is at an angle to it. That everything clicks into place so precisely and beautifully in the final scene is a tribute to just how tightly this loose-seeming film is constructed. Rarely have the loose threads of a plot been gathered with as much skill or in a more satisfying way.

Many of the photographic tricks (different film stocks, different aspect ratios, scenes undercranked) sound gimmicky, but, except for the undercranking, most are there for people who notice and transparent to those who don't. The cast is uniformly excellent.

For all its playfulness and its conceits, this moving, elegiac film tells the story of a great love and is a great love story.

Alice Rorhwacher does it again, another success after Lazarus, which I very much enjoy and remember (especially the ending). In this movie surprisingly, the ending is the least memorable part of the movie. The story follows an English archaeologist who dedicated his life to tomb raiding ancient Etrurian graves in an unspecified area of Italy in an unspecified period of the 20th century. He has a gift, a sixth sense that allows him to "sense" the presence of treasures. We follow his story as a gentle and quiet fish out of water in this country of poor farmers, criminals, art merchants, musicians, powerful matriarchs and fools. It's a weird fable about desecration, family, finding your roots, tradition.

It captures a feeling of "nowhere-ness" that really expresses the state of Italy as a country, with its rich history that is ultimately buried, forgotten, left at the behest of rich egotists and poor vandals. The juxtaposition of aesthetics is striking: the falling ruins of old houses and abandoned buildings with the sprawling but subdued rise of urban modernity (just Happy as Lazarus). The agonizing destruction of the past, the uncertainty and the greed of the future, and how the two don't even recognize each other in any way. A tale of unseen-ness. And at the center, Arthur, a man who doesn't belong in either of those, and doesn't know the point of his own existence.

So yeah, really good movie. There are a few flaws, though: Alba Rohrwacher's character feels like a very clear (too clear) personification of a concept, an idea, a satire, and she plays her like a Bond villain, which is strange and distracting. There are some moments (like the ending) where the metaphorical aspects of the film are more pronounced and less hidden, which is also distracting, and subtract meaning to the whole story. And finally, the ending could have been cut a little short; it's never pleasant when you stay seated and you feel like the movie should end at any time but it refuses and continuous.

Other than that, great movie. Slow, atmospheric, dreamy, makes you feel lost in time.

I'm a sucker for most things italian, especially it's cinema, I loved La Chimera. The story of Arthur, an Englishman inhabiting an Italian's universe, whose remarkable abilities have led him to a life with a group of tomb robbers going after Etruscan antiquities for sale on the black market. Beguiled by love, Arthur is tormented by the memory of his lost Beniamina, whose mother (Isabella Rossellini) serves as a matriarchal groundpost. His lone, sad male presence in an otherwise all female family, is delightfully contentious and catty. Italia, the 'student maid', plays the fool to survive and succeed against odds.

Like a troupe of players, the tomb hunters seem like a vagabond theatre troupe, reminiscent of the circus in La Strada, one of Fellini's greats.

Adventurously cutting between film stocks and formats, the direction and camera work are exceptional and fitting.

A wonderful tale of surprise and intrigue driven by a cast of characters that only Italian's could present. Lovely in it's life and vibrancy.

Poetry is the first word that comes to mind when trying to describe that movie. Alice Rorhwacher depicts a world where past and present are interwoven. A forgotten rural Italy, haunted by the remnants of Antiquity. The movie is full of symbols, and the boundaries between past and present, life and death, reality and fantasy are constantly blurred.

The main character, Arthur, is marked by grief, and hides his pain among a band of gentle thieves. All around him, there is misery but also resilience, joy, survival. In this picaresque landscape, Arthur seems to be the only character inhabited by tragedy.

Rorhwacher has the power to evoke emotions that are hard to describe. I left the theater in a contemplative state and I've been thinking about the movie a lot since then. Only good movies can do that.