Enchanting romantic drama contends with past, present
When we talk about “movie magic,” the first thing that comes to mind is often something like the bikes achieving liftoff in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” But it applies no less to Alice Rohrwacher’s wondrous “La Chimera,” a grubbily transcendent folk tale of a film that finds its enchantment buried in the ground.
“Were you dreaming?” a train conductor asks the sleeping Arthur (Josh O’Connor), a distant, temperamental Brit in
Italy with little more to his name than the rumpled cream-colored linen suit he wears. The answer is yes. Radiant memories of Arthur’s dead lover, Benjamina, haunt his dreams and propel him on a quest into the underground tombs of Tuscany.
A melancholy spell seems to hang over Arthur, who has a gift for finding ancient relics. It’s the early 1980s. Arthur is returning home from a stint in jail for grave robbing. His homecoming is received like a hero’s return by the scruffy, carnivalesque band of tombaroli — tomb raiders who plunder Etruscan artifacts — who look on Arthur more like a prince than a destitute thief. They call him “maestro.”
The precise moment I fell in love with “La Chimera” — and this is very much a movie to love — is an early montage in which Arthur and his fellow scavengers scamper across the countryside, hiding from bumbling police, while a folk song about the tombarolo Englishman is sung.
“La Chimera,” the third in a loose trilogy for Rohrwacher, following “The Wonders” and “Happy as
Lazzaro,” is the fullest realization yet of her cinema of “magical neo-realism.” She’s among the most thrillingly original filmmakers working today.
Rohrwacher’s fascination is with the past — the hold it can have on the present, the vast yet minuscule distance between long ago and today. “Happy as Lazzaro” charmingly walked a 19thcentury peasant into present day.
“La Chimera” is even more beguiling. The tombaroli make a merry band, but Arthur’s plight is shadowed by death. “He was looking for a passage to the afterlife,” one of his companions says.
Arthur and company make cash by selling their unearthed wares. But he’s driven less by money than a compulsion to reach the dead, to reach Benjamina. He occasionally visits her mother, Flora (Isabella Rossellini ), who, like him, has not yet accepted the death of her daughter. She receives him courteously and deferentially, with an old-world manner.
At her crumbling villa, Arthur meets Italia (Carol Duarte), a voice student
who, Flora says, is tonedeaf. But she might be the sharpest observer in the film. Italia is horrified by the plundering of the graves. In other ways, she’s the embodiment of the time the tombs recall. It’s noted that the Etruscans elevated women in society — one of, though not the only, relic of the past that “La Chimera” brings forward to today.
The greatest Etruscan discovery — a glorious subterranean chamber
— is made on a beach with a factory just down the shoreline. But the even more remarkable excavation of the film is of Arthur’s grieving soul. O’Connor’s performance is entrancing and confounding. You might wonder how a film can be so nimbly poised between past and present. The stuff of fairy tales — of a kind of storytelling magic — is what Rohrwacher wants to unearth. “Were you dreaming?” Good question.
(In Italian with English subtitles)
Not rated
Running time: 2:13
How to watch: In theaters