La chimera

dir: Alice Rohrwacher

2023

This is the second time in as many months where I have allowed myself to seem extremely pretentious by titling a review I’ve written in English with a title in another language.

I don’t make these decisions, I just have to live with the consequences. The film was released as La chimera, just like Io Capitano was released as it was released internationally a couple of months ago.

Thus, here I am, talking about La chimera, or The Chimera if that little ‘La’ is so distracting.

And then most people would be like “what TF is a chimera anyway” but it won’t be phrased as a question, because they don’t care, and they’re not reading this review anyway, the salty jerks.

What this flick is about, beyond chimeras, is a British guy (Josh O’Connor) who’s in Tuscany for reasons not immediately obvious. Initially he’s just a young, thin Brit in a shabby white linen suit lolling about the countryside despite it clearly being a cold time of year. He is recently out of jail, and returns to a charming little hovel next to the walls of some ancient castle because he presumably has nowhere else to go.

Ancient indeed. This strange flick is not about what you assume it would be about, which is, why did all those people believe that bullshit last year that every (white, middle-class, middle-aged, Westerner male) thinks about the Roman Empire at least once a day, but instead is about a bunch of reprobates who try to eke out a meagre living finding and pilfering artifacts that predate the Romans, being remnants of the Etruscan peoples.

But then in truth it’s not really about that either, I don’t think. It’s possibly more about the main guy Arthur / Arturo’s grief about losing a woman called Beniamina, or the deep connection he still has with her, and the desire to be with her again beyond all else. His affinity for the ancient is really his inability to want to live without her; his ability to find these ancient burial grounds, tombs or shrines arises solely from his longing for Beniamina, or for death.

One of the few people who has time for him who isn’t involved in all this graverobbing malarkey is Beniamina’s mother Flora (played by the great Isabella Rossellini), who lives in a crumbling mansion, and still talks as if Beniamina’s just out of sight, like she could pop in at some time. The fact that Arthur keeps this delusion alive alongside her keeps her happy, and keeps him in coats and cigarettes apparently.

Also in the crumbling mansion is a woman who Flora exploits as an unpaid maid, called Italia (Carol Duarte), the fiction being that she’s paying her in singing lessons. In truth Italia, I think ironically played by a Brazilian actress, is using Flora in order to house herself and her offspring, a toddler and a surly tween. Italia makes advances towards Arthur, but he only has eyes for the dead…

If anything I’ve written makes it sound like the flick has a plot, please allow me to apologise – this flick is a plotless hangout whatever happens happens kind of movie, not something with a plot, per se. That doesn’t mean the director doesn’t know what she’s doing – there is an unclear but obvious structure to at least part of the framework surrounding Arthur’s time on this planet.

The crew of jerks he works with, well, you’d call them his friends, and they think of him as their leader, because he possesses an ability they do not (at least twice people sing songs somewhat ironically about how great he is), but Arthur clearly doesn’t think of them as his friends. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but from the film’s opening scenes it’s pretty obvious that Arthur himself is an abrasive jerk, and every now and then he erupts with an act of jerkiness to remind people that he’s either not a nice person or not long for this world.

Friends or not the crew of tombalori really have more of the feel of a group of performers, of a commedia dell’arte troupe more than thieves, and they accentuate this by dressing in clumsy drag for an Epiphany festival (just after Christmas) that doubles as a welcome home for Arthur (also intended to convince him to start working again).

They find artifacts, they take them to a veterinarian, then palm them off to someone they only know as Spartaco, who pays them peanuts (in lira, which shows at least that this is set about thirty years ago), who fakes documents for their provenance and then sells them to museums for squillions.

Arthur doesn’t really care about any of that. He has no need or desire for money. He tries to find in the artifacts some connection to Beniamina, not the funds that he would need for his constant smoking.

When the crew interact with someone connected to Spartaco, who knows more about their business than they do, she turns to us, in the audience, and mentions that the Etruscans were a matriarchal kind of society, and Italy would have been way better off if they had stayed the dominant culture rather than be conquered / assimilated by the Romans.

Thus does the crew of graverobbers become a stand in for the boisterous, chauvinistic Romans: they are all about the jolly japes and having fun, but they’re also grasping, slavering dogs fighting over the scraps of the ancient world whose beauty they are incapable of appreciating.

When Italia is kicked out of the grand dame’s mansion, she sets up a communal household for women and children in the ruins of an abandoned train station. And though he is a man, they offer to let Arthur stay if he wants(as long as he works for his keep).

Isn’t this the Etruscan vision of a matriarchal, harmonious commune that the earlier character broke the fourth wall to tell us was possible, if only the Romans hadn’t had their way?

But that’s not what Arthur is looking for. He’s not looking for love, or relationships, or a community to be connected with, or meaning, or a place to belong and feel safe.

This is solely and entirely my take, so this shouldn’t be confused with something that’s actually in the film, or that these were the director’s intentions or anything (I have no idea what her intentions were, but good on her anyway). This is just how I interpret it – this is a mythic, dreamlike take on Orpheus and Eurydice, but sort of in reverse. Arthur often has visions, or are they affected memories, of Beniamina and a red thread, unravelling from her dress at some stage, but one she keeps pursuing. And he, instead of trying to bring her back up to the light, back to the land of the living, keeps going down, downwards into the underworld. Instead of trying and failing to bring her back to life, she instead brings him into her world, and he is finally happy only when he gets to the end of the red thread.

The red thread isn’t really a recognisable element from that particular myth, but it does appear in other myths, mainly the one referring to Theseus following Ariadne’s red thread in order to get out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Here, instead the red thread leads him back down into the darkness.

A chimera, in Greek mythology, was an unholy creature made up of other creatures: a bit of goat here, a bit of lion there, a snake for a tail, you get the drift. But this isn’t a Greek story. At one stage a character refers to the trinkets of the dead the crew steals as chimeras, but I think the real use of the term is that in Italian chimera can refer to a dream, but an unattainable one, a mirage, one that cannot be grasped or achieved.

And yet we’re given the clear impression that the lovers are reunited in the end.

This is very much a “mileage is going to vary so goddamn much” kind of movie. It’s not mainstream fare, it’s not even usual arthouse fare, and it’s certainly not like general Italian cinema (not enough sexual harassment, misogyny or cheating on spouses etc). I don’t know if Josh O’Connor is enjoyable or compelling in this role. A lot of the flick is watching him walking around getting progressively shabbier and dirtier. If I want to watch videos of a shabby person walking around, I’d watch videos of myself going about my daily routines.

I am not rail-thin, though, nor am I an actor. He conveys something, or a lot, that I wouldn’t be able to convey, because he’s a decent actor, I have no doubt. A lot of the time he’s conveying this confused expression like he’s not even sure what the director wants in some scenes. The language barrier doesn’t even matter much, if at all. Most of his dialogue is single word or single sentences at a time. One enjoyable element within the flick is when Italia teaches him a bunch of hand gestures and expressions that can convey a whole bunch more in Italian than words could.

And then they repeat those gestures towards the end, bringing them all together in a touching way.

It’s an interesting, meandering kind of film, but it is all a bit exhausting without, at least for me, much of a satisfying conclusion, but that’s okay. It’s enough.

It's also extremely goofy, in many scenes. For whatever reason, the director elects to have a bunch of montage scenes happen all sped up like they're scenes from episodes of The Goodies or Benny Hill or some older slapstick movies. I'm not a snob against it, but it does make things feel goofier than I think was intended.

7 times watching a shabby young Prince Charles stumble his way across the Tuscan / Umbrian countryside has its appeal out of 10

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“It’s of inestimable value. That’s what we’re here for. To estimate the inestimable” - La chimera