LA CHIMERA - Mark Reviews Movies

La Chimera, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 28, 2024

A man haunted by death and seemingly connected to the spiritual realm is the protagonist of La Chimera. Writer/director Alice Rohrwacher's movie, though, isn't quite as mysterious as that setup suggests, and its ambling narrative, mixing methods and genres without ever quite finding some solid ground, keeps this man and his search for something in the face of death at an unfortunate distance.

The setting is Italy in the 1980s, and British archeologist Arthur (Josh O'Connor) is returning to his home away from home by train, following some time in prison, as we later discover. Whatever educational and honorable goals Arthur may have had in his career have apparently gone to the wayside. He's part of what's essentially a group of graverobbers, looking for ancient tombs, buried around the area and mainly belonging to the Etruscan civilization, to steal whatever artifacts they collect and sell to a local black-market dealer.

That's the basic premise, but Rohrwacher's storytelling settles for no mere heist tale. For one thing, there's a bit of magic to Arthur's tactics. He uses a divination rod to uncover long-lost gravesites, and his approach works seemingly without fail. He has episodes, which his teammates call his "chimeras," that can cause him to faint whenever he does find the entrance to a tomb, and his dreams and waking visions are filled with images of Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello), the love of his life, whose absence from the mortal plane has him on a quest to find some mythical gate to the land of the dead.

In other words, the man is somewhat fascinating as a central figure—tragic in his personal and professional lives, filled with regret for losing the woman he loves and taking up this illegal enterprise for survival and/or as a way to possibly reunite with her, trapped in the past in a way that goes beyond metaphor by the end of Rohrwacher screenplay. O'Connor's performance is still, quiet, and internalized for the most part (Athur has an angry outburst on the train when a merchant presses him about his smell), and the longing on his face from memories of Beniamina or finding some item that hasn't been seen by human eyes for almost two millennia speaks more than the script often allows him to.

It's also the extent of this character, a man who regularly feels as if he's in the backdrop of his own story for everything Rohrwacher attempts to do with this material. There's the gang, for example, who live as social outcasts and sometimes break the fourth wall as if they're in a documentary about the subject of graverobbing (Shot on a mix of film stock, the movie does possess an aesthetic authenticity).

On a few occasions, the story stops for some local troubadours to sing of the thieves' adventures, their motives for stealing ancient relics, and Arthur's mystical skills and sad back story. The combination of realism and folklore may be an enticing distraction, but it still results in coming across as a redundant one in actual practice.

There's Beniamina's mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini), who takes Arthur into her dilapidated home as family, even as her own family tries to put her in a nursing home. She's a former music teacher, currently giving singing lessons to Italia (Carol Duarte) in exchange for the student's services as a live-in housekeeper. Italia and Arthur develop something of an unspoken romantic connection, as she teaches him the proper way to speak Italian with his hands and the two share the secret that Italia is hiding her children in the sizeable manor. Of course, Arthur's love for a dead woman prevents that from going too far—or anywhere, for that matter.

The problem isn't that this story doesn't take a familiar, obvious route, however. It's that the constant diversions—with songs, formal shifts in terms of the filmmaking approach, and even whole threads and characters with little ultimate purpose—prevent the material from examining this character, his moral and ethical dilemmas in doing this kind of work, and the underground world—both literally and in terms of the law—of which he is a part.

Some of the specifics of this world are quirkily intriguing, such as how the artifact dealer practices out of a veterinary clinic, and momentarily poignant, such as the way the colors of paintings on the wall of a tomb instantly fade as soon as air from the outside is allowed in. A nightmare of sorts, in which Arthur is confronted by familiar faces explaining how much he has taken from them, is eerie in confronting the man's crisis of conscience.

If anything, the amalgamation of techniques, ideas, and storytelling threads does give La Chimera a sense of the transitory. Everything is fleeting—from memories, to relationships, to professional connections, to ideals. Much of what Arthur experiences is left unresolved by the end. That's clearly a significant part of the point of this movie, but the ways in which Rohrwacher engages in that approach often makes it feel as if the movie is uncertain of its purpose.

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