The Daily Telegraph - Features
Josh O’Connor transfixes as a bereaved lover on a trip to the underworld
La Chimera
15 cert, 133 min
★★★★★
Dir Alice Rohrwacher
Starring Josh O’Connor, Isabella Rossellini, Vincenzo Nemolato, Carol Duarte, Julia Vella, Alba Rohrwacher
There’s a sudden act of violence in the middle of La Chimera, the latest ethereally beguiling film from Alice Rohrwacher, which made me clamp my hand to my mouth in horror – even though it’s perpetrated against a piece of statuary. Such is the singularity of this director’s vision, her tender love of the Italian soil and the culture rooted in it.
If you’ve seen any of Rohrwacher’s earlier work (The Wonders, Happy as Lazzaro), you’ll know how tethered it is to tradition, ancient mystique, the laws of the land. One early shot here could almost symbolise her art – there’s a thread of red yarn attached to someone which disappears right into the earth, and we realise that its owner, trying to tug it loose, is in heaven.
It belongs to the late love of the main character, a forlorn Englishman named Arthur (The Crown and Challengers star Josh O’Connor), who has made himself a base with a tin-roof shack in the Etruscan countryside, beside a ruined old wall. He’s a dowser, who can use a divining rod or just his natural antennae to sniff out relics underground, and as such has become the linchpin of a small troupe of “tombaroli” – grave robbers.
Before any particular narrative pushes through, we amble about with this burly clan, and meet their matriarch of sorts, a retired opera singer animated with sparkle, in a wheelchair, by Isabella Rossellini. They’re all delightfully bemused by Arthur, a persistent stranger in their midst with his filthy suits and imperfect Italian.
When O’Connor’s in the frame, Rohrwacher’s camera (the photographer is the brilliant Hélène Louvart) is gleaming right back at him. It’s hard to think of a recent film that has doted this fondly on the face of its leading man, who’s first caught sleeping on a train in a besotted close-up. With that pained, little-boy-lost quality of his coming to the fore as soon as he opens his eyes, O’Connor is ideal as this director’s latest scruffy muse.
In the inspired second half, a string of set pieces await which it almost feels like an act of vandalism to describe too closely: the plundering of a shrine is one such, followed by a black-market exhibition on a boat, MCed by the director’s sister, Alba, as a regal auctioneer.
The further down the film descends, the more transfixing its images tend to get, as if Rohrwacher and Louvart have teamed up on an archaeological dig for their own treasures of texture and light. Slippery as ever, this is a piece to meditate on, with its themes of honouring the past (the struggle to move on when mourning a dead lover) and severing connections with the sacred – as practised by the grave robbers with a braggadocio that the sad-eyed Arthur can’t share. One man’s scavenging jaunt could be another’s Orphean journey to the underworld.
In cinemas now