Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Writers: Alice Rohrwacher, Carmela Covino, Marco Pettenello
Stars: Josh O’Connor, Carol Duarte, Vincenzo Nemolato
Synopsis: A group of archaeologists and the black market of historical artifacts.
Love, melancholy, and magical realism intertwine in Alice Rohrwacher’s latest work, La Chimera—a touching multi-layered exploration of remembrance, love, and the intertwining between the human and the spiritual. It shifts the viewer’s emotions from left to right due to the beauty of the Italian filmmaker’s dreamy, poetic storytelling and the incandescent emotions that exude from the landscapes, shot by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, and performances.
Bless Alice Rohrwacher with all of her heart. The Italian filmmaker has delivered one touching picture after another throughout her growing and fruitful career. She’s used tales about love, loss, and youthfulness, intertwining them all with Italy’s past while smearing magical realism to her narratives. Many directors have used their perspectives on the country’s history to uplift and add layers to their narratives. This is primarily seen in Germany’s new wave of directors, with Christian Petzold and Angela Schenelac leading the pack. But Rohrwacher’s cinema has a different feeling. After her international success, Happy As Lazaro, she has remained a household name in the modern era of Italian auteurs. Filled with bliss and elegance, Rohrwacher clicks on all cylinders, especially since her latest work, La Chimera, sets her down a path of great success.
Set in 1980s Italy, the title gives a couple of hints at what’s to come later in the narrative. Many may refer to a “chimera” as the fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail–and the Italian filmmaker hints at the Greek mythology creature’s mystically through her mythic underpinnings. But Rohrwacher turns to the word’s second definition: a thing that is hoped or wished for but is illusory or impossible to achieve. The first images she presents give us an introduction to this. The film begins from the point of view of the current unnamed protagonist, shown in lavish super-8 footage. The protagonist’s gaze is aimed at a beautiful blonde woman, Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello), as the sun kisses her face. These images feel like a dream or a distant memory that a person is trying to hold onto.
It is soon revealed through us via this imagery that Beniamina has passed away and that these moments scattered across La Chimera are indeed memories of a man burdened by grief. In the scene immediately following, we meet the film’s protagonist, Arthur (Josh O’Connor), who is sleeping on the train home. “Were you dreaming?” asks the ticket collector to the young man, maintaining that relevant trajectory of intertwining dreams and reality subtly, yet resplendently. These visions introduce us to a world that cannot be seen with human eyes, a portal that connects the reverie with the land Arthur and his tombaroli (Etruscan tomb raiders) crew scavenge for objects left for the dead so their souls can rest.
Josh O’Connor brilliantly approaches his character as if he were a living ghost, a man who lost his vigor and passion after losing the love of his life. He is primarily a brooding figure, an unreliable protagonist who doesn’t believe death separates us from the people we hold dear. And, just like Lazarro in Rohrwacher’s previous feature, Arthur has a preternatural ability that might serve him as a guide to reach his beloved Beniamina. He can find the locations of old tombs through divine premonition; his crew of tomb-raiding criminals scavenges the objects found while the Englishman looks for her signal. Many other characters help him throughout his journey of desolation, particularly Italia (Carol Duarte, delivering a lovely performance filled with warmth), who is like a beacon of light that brightens Arthur’s path, as well as his heart. So, he isn’t alone in this journey.
In the Q&A for this film at the 61st New York Film Festival, an audience member asked Alice Rohrwacher about her decision to curate Arthur’s journey of identity and yearning with so many nods to classic myths, fables, and fairy tales. The Italian filmmaker responded by saying, “Fairy tales are like a distillation of reality.” She mentioned that showering her films with magical realism was her way of approaching reality in a non-schmaltzy or syrupy manner–in her words, in a non-pornographic way. Many filmmakers abuse emotions like sympathy or empathy in the experience that their characters endure. And while Rorhrwacher’s films contain those moments in which the reverie comes to life in alluring ways, they end up ringing truer and feeling more emotionally potent than those who want to cram humanism forcefully.
Much like the Argentinian-French novelist Julio Cortázar (writer of “Casa Tomada,” “La Noche Boca Arriba,” and “Hopscotch”), Rorhrwacher embalms her stories with an array of metaphors and poetic elements as the characters she writes go on their respective quests for identity and deal with longing. Both of them treat their stories with elements of fantasy. However, Cortázar was more of a surrealist and existentialist, covering the draining mundanity of the everyday lives of ordinary people; meanwhile, Rohrwacher relies more on folkloric narratives about the complexities of human relationships – dealing with the emotionally shifting nature of the people we care for, the bridge between life and death, as well as the history of the land beneath our feet.
From the moment the film begins, Rohrwacher puts a spell on you, the effect increasing as the story moves on from one magical moment to another. Nowadays, there aren’t many cinematic experiences like the one Alice Rohrwacher brings us, which is full of splendor, yet painting melancholy in a shade that isn’t its usual dark one. The Italian filmmaker doesn’t want to use the pessimistic tone to reflect our existentialist thoughts. Instead, she embraces the darkness of loss to conjure something full of light. As a piece of cinema, La Chimera feels like a product of many recollections, emotions, questions, and experiences, all put together in a manner that reflects some of our doubts about the culmination of life.
La Chimera is more than relatable and approachable; instead, it reorients how we think about the line between this world and the next. There’s a moment late in La Chimera when Arthur caresses and admires a stone head missing from a 5th-century statue. Arthur looks at it with a sense of remembrance; the piece reminds him of his lost loved one, Beniamina. Just like the first scene in the film, but with the roles reversed, the sun is kissing his face this time around. It takes him back; all of the memories they shared start to play in his mind like a collage; he quickly glimpses through it all as the equally magnetic and towering power of love and loss crosses his entire body.
He then remarks with a quote that was previously said by Carol Duarte’s character: “You were not meant for human eyes.” And the line puts the final nail in the coffin in terms of the film’s impact. With a single sentence, Alice Rohrwacher captures the essence of her movie, uplifting the thematic and emotional importance of every scene that precedes this one. We replay every single scene in our minds with those words in consideration. They gain a different meaning, even the ones where you think the film was meandering a bit. It is the healing process personified, made by a filmmaker who converts our worries into fables that are as grounded as they are poised and soul-stirring.
