La Chimera – first-look review

Indi­ana Jones and the Dial of Des­tiny isn’t the only film at Cannes 2023 to con­cern itself with archae­o­log­i­cal der­ring-do, ancient arte­facts, mem­o­ry and mor­tal­i­ty: Set among the tombaroli, grave-rob­bers, in 1980s Italy, Alice Rohrwacher’s divine La Chimera is an obser­vant and com­ic por­trait of a moment with­in Ital­ian his­to­ry, and an earthy, shim­mer­ing fable about the gravesites we walk over every day.

Appro­pri­ate­ly, it con­firms Rohrwach­er as a fig­ure absolute­ly cen­tral to the con­tin­u­ing tra­di­tion – and thus the future – of cin­e­ma. La Chimera doesn’t belong in a muse­um, it’s a liv­ing one.

The film opens with Arthur (Josh O’Connor) nap­ping on a train in a dirty, rum­pled linen suit, like an Edwar­dian Rip Van Win­kle who fell asleep in a tent in the Val­ley of Kings and is only now wak­ing up in Umbria.

A lapsed archae­ol­o­gist played by O’Connor with halt­ing Ital­ian (writ­ten into the script) and touch of sun­stroke, Arthur finds buried tombs with a dows­ing rod and through visions – his ​“chimeras.”

Just sprung from jail as the film begins, ​“Arturo” joins back up with his old gang, a mot­ley crew of small-time grave rob­bers who break into most­ly small-time graves, filled with stone trin­kets to accom­pa­ny the souls of the anony­mous dead. These local inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors sell off the arti­facts to the unseen Spar­ta­co, who oper­ates out of a new glassy high-rise and is well-con­nect­ed enough to oper­ate at the scale of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism in the dereg­u­lat­ed 80s, pay­ing off author­i­ties and laun­der­ing the cul­tur­al plun­der through inter­na­tion­al­ly respectable muse­ums and wealthy collectors.

From one per­spec­tive, the tombaroli are folk heroes, run­ning from the cara­binieri and lib­er­at­ing such nat­ur­al resources as they can find beneath their feet. What good is it doing in the ground, after all – who are the heirs to the lega­cy of the dead, if not the liv­ing? But is our inher­i­tance only material?

The Umbri­an farm­land is so full of buried Etr­uscan tombs that the tombaroli don’t even stop in awe as their flash­lights sur­vey sculp­tures and fres­cos unseen by liv­ing eyes in mil­lenia – they just get to work with the crow­bars. The past is every­where – as a peri­od film, La Chimera sig­ni­fies its time­line by shoot­ing in loca­tions from the 1980s, which means both glassy new high-rise tow­ers and the many oth­er archi­tec­tur­al peri­ods that exist simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in Italy, in var­i­ous stages of ruin.

Arthur lives in a shan­ty town of sorts, at the base of a medieval city wall, sur­round­ed by as-yet-unburied junk of a more mod­ern vin­tage, but fre­quent­ly vis­its Flo­ra (Isabel­la Rosselli­ni), the grand­moth­er of his absent love Beni­ami­na (glimpsed in flash­backs) in her crum­bling cen­turies-old vil­la, filled with old objects: antique lamps to be plun­dered by her daugh­ters, to own or to sell; clothes of dead rel­a­tives, for Arthur to borrow.

Down the hill is the local train sta­tion, aban­doned for decades, grass grow­ing high between the dis­used tracks. A char­ac­ter won­ders: as a derelict plot of pub­lic prop­er­ty, does the sta­tion belong to every­body, or to nobody?

Rohrwach­er is a magi­cian, reveal­ing the glim­mers of the mirac­u­lous glint­ing with­in her real­ism with a lit­tle shim­my of the wrist, like an uncle pulling a coin from behind your ear. Shot in a com­bi­na­tion of 16mm, Super 16mm, and 35mm by Hélène Lou­vart, La Chimera is fab­u­lous­ly tac­tile but also hyper­re­al, nos­tal­gic and cin­e­mat­ic enough to encom­pass whim­si­cal under­crank­ing, expo­si­tion deliv­ered via folk bal­lad, a direct ref­er­ence to Fed­eri­co Fellini’s Roma, even the pres­ence of Isabel­la Rosselli­ni her­self, grac­ing the movie with her mother’s face and her father’s name. Nat­u­ral­is­tic dia­logue, when revis­it­ed lat­er in the film, takes on the cir­cu­lar, fat­ed log­ic of a dream.

Rohrwach­er under­stands that time trav­el is part of every­day life, that we pass through sev­er­al dif­fer­ent time­lines every day, that we even wear them on our bod­ies – a real­iza­tion root­ed in La Chimera, as it was in her pre­vi­ous fea­ture, Hap­py as Laz­zaro, in the vivid mate­r­i­al real­i­ty of rur­al Italy.

Char­ac­ters in her film par­tic­i­pate in rur­al folk­ways and mod­ern fads, don­ning clown make­up for a vil­lage Epiphany parade and danc­ing to synth-pop at an out­door con­cert spon­sored by the pow­er plant; they dress in stur­dy fab­rics that could mark them as mid cen­tu­ry peas­ants, aside from the occa­sion­al flash of elec­tric-blue wool and lycra blend argyle socks.

Arthur is a kind of Orpheus, drawn back to the under­world with his sub­con­scious visions of gravesites and ghosts, his chimeras and dreams of Beni­ami­na. But as new build­ings, and new pos­si­bil­i­ties, spring up around him, the film begins to ques­tion the lure of the past, and pon­der whether the dead have the right to stay buried.

The film ends with Arthur in the court­yard of a half-built build­ing, sur­round­ed by open-walled con­crete and a skele­ton of exposed rebar. It’s unclear whether con­struc­tion is ongo­ing or has been aban­doned, and as Arthur plumbs the depths below him we don’t know whether the mod­ern world around is being built up, or slow­ly com­ing down.