Lonely grave robber haunted by his conscience

Josh O’Connor is superb as a grave-robbing archaeology dropout with a grand obsession in Alice Rohrwacher’s ragged masterpiece set in 1980s Italy, writes Paul Whitington

La Chimera (15A, 130 mins) ★★★★★

Josh O’Connor is one of the most interesting young actors around, and perhaps the most impressive thing about him is his range. In God’s Own Country he played a Yorkshire farmer in denial about his homosexuality; in The Crown, a petulant Prince Charles; and in Challengers, a tennis player prone to McEnroe-esque tantrums. He moves between contrasting roles with apparent effortlessness, but Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera asks another question of him — can he play a wretch?

Arthur is one such, a failed archaeology student who has turned up in 1980s Italy and gotten mixed up with a gang of grave robbers. Is he English, or Irish? There seems to be some confusion, but his partners in crime are in no doubt as to his special gift. Using only a divining rod, Arthur has an unerring knack of finding Etruscan tombs: when he does he falls to the ground in an exhausted trance while his comrades rifle through ancient artefacts and flog them to a mysterious dealer called Spartico.

The gang call Arthur’s trances ‘chimeras’, and know the value of them. But these tombaroli (tomb-raiders) are not the most loyal bunch: when we first meet Arthur he’s just been released from prison after a botched tomb raid he, it seems, was the slowest runner. Straggling back into the walled Tuscan town where the gang hide out, Arthur is furious with his colleagues and lets them know it.

Unkempt, and wearing a grubby white suit, Arthur cuts a ludicrous figure, but not everyone thinks so. In a lovely performance, Isabella Rossellini plays Flora, a minor aristocrat who lives in a nearby tumbledown palazzo and welcomes

Arthur like a long lost son. She prefers to think of him as an archaeologist, fusses over him like a doting hen, and refers constantly to the imminent return of her daughter, Beniamina, with whom Arthur was in love.

Whenever she says the girl’s name, Arthur nods sadly, for Beniamina has disappeared, and may in fact be dead. She is his grand obsession, and every time his gang lifts the seal on another tomb, he enters eagerly, eyes scanning all around as though she might be within.

The tombaroli mythologise themselves in song, providing new myths to match the old ones scattered in the Tuscan soil all around them. But no one’s getting rich quick, until one night, on a lonely beach near an oil refinery, they hit the jackpot.

In a brilliant move, Rohrwacher then brings us underground to an untouched archaeological site lined with statues and icons while the robbers tap away at the entrance above. When they open the vault, the sea air destroys vibrant frescos almost instantly. It’s an Etruscan temple, 5th century BC, and when one of the gang uses a stone to hack the head off a goddess, that is the last straw for Arthur.

While the rest of the gang seem entirely indifferent to the beauty and antiquity of the pieces they find, Arthur picks them up and stares at them, as though looking for guidance. He could be Orpheus, scouring the underworld for his lost love, and he alone is haunted by the immorality of what he and gang are up to.

There are references in La Chimera to the great canon of Italian cinema, in particular Fellini’s exuberant grotesques. But it also made me think of Boccaccio, and his mediaeval tales exploring the tensions between high morality and the needs of the poor.

The tombaroli lay claim to our sympathy, citing their lack of resources, and the jobless morass of 1980s Italy. But really they are part of the advance guard of rampant capitalism, which will trample down tradition across Europe in the dubious name of economic progress.

La Chimera is a beautiful, haunting film, playful and melancholy, deliberately ragged around the edges. And Arthur is a pathetic figure, lost and impotent, chasing shadows. At one point the film seems to offer him hope, and a redemptive love affair with the free-spirited but moral Italia (Carol Duarte), But Arthur is too lost in the past to grasp this lifeline, and instead seems drawn relentlessly underground.

In cinemas from Friday May 10

Arthur is a pathetic figure, lost and impotent, chasing shadows. At one point the film seems to offer him hope... but he is too lost in the past