From Corpo Celeste to The Wonders to Happy as Lazzaro, Italian auteur Alice Rohrwacher has only got exponentially better with every film she’s released. Now, with La Chimera, we finally see her at what must surely be the peak of her powers, a magical-realist story of history, petty crime, lost love, and the search for self-obliteration that is genuinely awe-inspiring. It takes all her obsessions – the Italian countryside, off-the-grid underground economies, the changing seasons, and the malleable nature of our perceptions of reality – and refines them into pure magic, a story of lovable Italian grave-robbers and their near-mystical English leader that lands itself as easily one of the best films of the decade so far.
This Englishman is Arthur (Josh O’Connor, having a real banner year between this and Challengers), a young man probably from money back home but living like a wastrel in the 1980s Italian countryside, where the recent death of the love of his life Beniamina, combined with a brief stint in jail, has left him a haggard and furious shell of a man. Eventually, though, his old gang finds him and drags him back to doing what he does best – using what seems like a genuine sixth sense to uncover long-buried pre-Roman Etruscan tombs and snaffle up the ancient treasures within to later sell on to a mysterious benefactor.
The plot, as far as there is one, is a stop-start affair as Arthur and the crew look for old graves, while Arthur himself hangs out with Beniamina’s ageing mum Flora (Isabella Rossellini), very gradually, and very tentatively, finding himself developing feelings for Flora’s assistant Italia (Carol Duarte). Nothing in La Chimera happens in a straight line, the past always intruding on Arthur just as he intrudes on it with his unique, and definitely not quite legal, livelihood.
These descents into the underworld – an underworld that Arthur always seems to want to stay in permanently – are just some of the staggeringly beautiful set-pieces that Rohrwacher conjures up here. It’s hard to put into words just how good the formal work being done here is – every framing, every cut, every strange yet profound visual seems as if it has been summoned from another world. It’s immersive without ever resorting to the usual *immersion* tricks, seemingly effortless in the way it absorbs you in the sights and sounds of its world – at points I could almost smell the old rooms of Flora’s grand yet crumbling house, or feel the dirt of the digs beneath my own fingernails.
There’s a feeling of a dream or a hazy memory to much of La Chimera, and not just when Rohrwacher more openly embraces the supernatural elements, though these moments are particularly exquisite, especially a gently unnerving encounter on a train that blurs the lines between waking and dreams, past and present, and life and death. It goes to that old chestnut that ‘you don’t what you’ve got until it’s gone’, whilst also expanding on it – that searching to get *it* back is a futile and perhaps self-destructive task, one that can only succeed at the expense of all other meaningful things in your life.
It’s a bleak message, yes, yet Rohrwacher also manages to include plentiful moments of overwhelming hope – once I realised exactly where the bittersweet ending was going I caught myself genuinely beaming at the screen, a lighter-than-air feeling that subsequently carried me out of the cinema. Any time you get the impression that La Chimera might be meandering, it suddenly hits you with a jaw-dropping image or story turn, Rohrwacher eschewing the boringly literal whenever the raw feeling of the piece needs to take over.
The result is a film that truly, in every frame, with every bit of its phenomenal soundscape (both the sound design and the score have a perfect balance of the ethereal and the crunchily physical), and in the completely unfussy yet utterly convincing performances, transports you. Not just to 1980s Italy, though it certainly does take you there in all its strange part-modern, part-ancient glory, but to a place where one can walk arm in arm with death, where the human desire for meaning and beauty grants immortality to objects and people, where getting buried in an ancient tomb might just be the best thing to ever happen to you.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 
Terrific review. I loved this film.