It was almost the year of movie star Josh O’Connor. In one of the most devastating delays as a result of the SAG strike, his highly anticipated tennis film Challengers was pushed from its original fall release date to April 2024. (Eight whole months until we see those pro-athlete abs!) He also has a supporting role in the World War II drama Lee, which completely flew under the radar at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Then there’s the Italian film La Chimera, which received a warm reception at Cannes and was picked up by Neon. Still, presumably because of the strike, it has yet to be given a release date in the U.S.
Nevertheless, Alice Rohrwacher’s latest feature, where O’Connor plays a grieving tomb raider, has continued to make its way through the festival circuit. Whether any stateside moviegoers, save for critics and festival attendees, will be able to check out the Italian filmmaker’s latest feature before the year’s end is anyone's guess. But just like the ancient Etruscan sculptures unearthed in this film, La Chimera will still be just as marvelous when it is more widely released, however many months from now.
It feels appropriate that Rohrwacher would eventually make a film about archaeology, as her stories are either located in the past or play with time. From her semi-biographical film The Wonders about a family of beekeepers who reject modern living, to the time-jumping fable Happy as Lazzaro, which begins in mid-’70s with an isolated village of sharecroppers, to her Oscar-nominated short Le Pupille set during World War II, she’s able to bring a comforting dose of warmness and whimsy to bygone eras and her own Tuscan memories without ignoring the complex political and personal realties for her protagonists.
These films also focus on the intricate dynamics within small but vigorous communities. In La Chimera, set in the 1980s, she sets her sights on an eccentric troupe of tombaroli, led by O’Connor’s reserved but temperamental Arthur, whose occupation selling grave goods is hardly just a capitalist venture. Whether a face as fresh as O’Connor’s is the best suited to play a worn-down, shell of man is debatable. His role as Arthur is the sort of interior performance that requires a level of maturity and life experience that can immediately be registered on an older, more well-known actors’ face. (O’Connor just does not look like a man who’s been through anything!) Yet, watching him stomp around the Italian countryside in a chic, beige suit like one of Fellini’s male protagonists provides a fun glimpse of the sort of iconic roles his talents could take him in the future.
In his seaside village, Arthur is known as “the Englishman”—although he speaks in Italian for the majority of the film. Among his ragtag group of robbers, he’s also somewhat of a foreign treasure. It’s not just that Arthur is an archaeologist with a knowledge of ancient artifacts. Through some unexplained mystical process involving a wishbone-looking tree branch, he’s able to locate buried treasure, which the group then sells to a mysterious, faceless buyer named Spartaco (Alba Rohrwacher).
More significantly, though, Arthur is a sad man “lost in his chimeras,” or illusions. Thievery isn’t just a vice but a spiritual endeavor following the death of his deceased lover Beniamina (Yile Vianello), who we see in sun-bathed flashbacks. Arthur spends the majority of the movie on a vaguely defined mission to connect with her in the afterlife. Meanwhile, in real life, he’s still welcome in her rambunctious, woman-dominated household, particularly by her mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini), who believes that her daughter has simply gone missing.
Rohrwacher is a master of arranging bustling, chatty scenes where a cacophony of overtalking voices somehow sound harmonious. They also quickly establish the power dynamics amongst her characters in an organically comedic way. Thus, these chaotic moments with Beniamina’s family (plus, the childish shenanigans amongst the tombaroli) add levity to a film that is largely carried by—sorry—a drag of a man.
Flora’s relationship with her tone-deaf music student named Italia (Carol Duarte), in particular, makes for some of the best parts of the film. Rossellini effortlessly—and comically—oscillates between warm matriarch and manipulative, wealthy woman, as she coaxes Italia into being her unpaid maid. Rossellini’s presence in this film, given how much Rorhwacher is clearly inspired by her father, feels naturally right. But the effervescence she delivers on-screen makes her casting feel necessary and not just a sentimental cameo.
When Arthur meets Italia, the story unfolds into a romantic-comedy of sorts as opposed to a slow-burning character study. Admittedly, this is where I wished the film would stay. But about two-thirds in, La Chimera’s narrative begins to falter, particularly when it tries to convey a heavy-handed moral lesson about Arthur and his friends’ crimes.
There’s an obvious critique running through La Chimera about how capitalism has tainted humans’ engagement with art. Unfortunately, this idea is presented in a “climactic” dream sequence that essentially amounts to “STEALING = BAD.” Out of all the fables embedded in Rohrwacher’s work, this one is probably conveyed in the least interesting manner. Meanwhile, there’s a lingering question about Arthur’s place as Englishman among these seemingly more desperate Italian criminals and the bohemian life he’s created for himself that feels like it deserves more inspection.
Eventually La Chimera finds its footing again, even if it takes what feels like two separate endings to get there. It may not be Rohrwacher’s magnum opus, like the buzz around this film would suggest, or even a progression in her filmography. Still, the strongest parts of this film, most notably its performances and cinematography, make it easier to forgive the (few) weaker ones. Overall, I would equate consuming this movie to getting lost in a gorgeous, detailed painting.
