La Chimera
THE MATCH FACTORYWe all have chimeras that torment us: idle dreams, utopias, a constant search for something that is not there in the hope that it may indeed exist. For Arthur (Josh O’Connor), his chimera is Beniamina, his late fiancé whom he desperately longs to be with. He uses his preternatural skills as a diviner to aid Italian tomb raiders (the so-called “tombaroli”) recover Etruscan artefacts to sell on the black market: these low-grade thieves are in it for the money, but Arthur is in it for love.
Many are the mythological and literary references in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, but the one that looms the largest is the oft-adapted one of Orpheus and Eurydice, more specifically the poem Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes. by Rainer Maria Rilke. Arthur moves through the narrative like a ghost, tied to the past in such a way that he cannot fully live life, a man out of time and (quite literally) out of place. It is not a coincidence that he shares a connection with Italia (Carol Duarte), a Brazilian music student-cum-maid for Beniamina’s elderly mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini), a single mom who embodies all of the joyful possibilities of the future, of a life filled with love. Arthur rejects Italia the person, thus also rejecting Italia the country, in favor of the old Italy, one that is entirely underground and old millennia, made up of dusty skeletons and gifts for the dead.
La Chimera is a conclusion to Rohrwacher’s trilogy of the past (started with Le Meraviglie and continued with Lazzaro Felice), and every character except Italia is either stuck in what came before or with how things used to be. Even Flora’s house is a decrepit mansion that is falling apart, a modern-day Miss Havisham in complete denial of the death of her daughter. Accepting that life does not last forever, that death is inevitable for everything and everyone, is what differentiates the living from the walking dead. It is only fitting that Rohrwacher uses what some deem a dead form of filmmaking – i.e. shooting on 16mm and 35mm film – to tell this story, the camera always panning and zooming in unexpected ways, with Nelly Quettier’s sharp editing constantly shifting between the two formats, creating a heightened sense of reality and fantasy that is a beauty to witness.
It may sound like La Chimera is a total downer of a film, which cannot be further from the truth. Arthur’s mythic journey lacks conventional humor, there is a hefty dose of levity and cinematic joy that makes this a truly special experience. The group of tombaroli is delightfully Italian, colorful and rambunctious in all the best ways, while the interactions between Arthur and Italia are deeply charming, especially when she starts teaching him Italian gestures to better fit in the community.
The music is also a key component of the picture and of Rohrwacher’s entire oeuvre. Here, she blends three very different styles: the film opens with a piece from Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and includes multiple classical compositions by Giuseppe Verdi and Mozart; then there are songs from the ‘70s and ‘80s, with Italian singer-songwriters like Rosanna Fratello and Vasco Rossi; lastly, there are a couple of folkloristic ballads made up for the film, transforming the tale of Arthur and his grave robbers into their own local legend. So many of these musical moments create magical touches of grace and beauty, culminating in the perfect touch of closing with Franco Battiato’s Gli Uccelli, which finds poetry and meaning in the simple flight and migration of birds, a moving song that is bound to make many audience members weep as they recover from the bittersweet ending.
It is easy to see contemporary Italian cinema as creatively bankrupt most years, which makes the existence of Alice Rohrwacher and films like La Chimera a true anomaly that should be cherished and championed. After two viewings, many of the depths of her screenplay (with a collaboration by Marco Pettenello and Carmela Covino) are just starting to open up, while the emotional resonance of Arthur’s self-destructive journey of love hits even harder (O’Connor’s performance is terrific, not to mention how well he speaks Italian). La Chimera is not just the best film to come out of Italy in 2023, but also one of the finest, most poetic, and inherently cinematic experiences of the year.