Year: 2023
Country: Italy, France, Switzerland, Turkey
Language: Italian, English, French
Genre: Comedy, Fantasy, Adventure
Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Screenwriters: Alice Rohrwacher, Carmela Covino, Marco Pettenello
Cinematography: Hélène Louvart
Editor: Nelly Quettier
Cast:
Josh O’Connor
Carol Duarte
Vincenzo Nemolato
Isabella Rossellini
Alba Rohrwacher
Ramona Fiorini
Giuliano Mantovani
Lou Roy-Lecollinet
Melchiorre Pala
Gian Piero Capretto
Luciano Vergaro
Luca Chikovani
Yile Yara Vianello
Valentino Santagati
Piero Crucitti
Carlo Tarmati
Rating: 8.1/10
Whisked away to Tuscia (a historical region of Italy that comprised the territories under Etruscan influence, now covering Tuscany, Umbria and North Lazio regions) in the 1980s, audience gets instantly engrossed in a retro palette and texture that could merit umpteen accolades on their own terms, from Alice Rochwacher’s fourth fiction feature LA CHIMERA. The robust sense of a vintage aesthetic, like the color’s full-blown vibrancy, time-capsule creations (the getup, the jollification, those antiques) and locations (a derelict mansion, a deserted train station and those Etruscan relics and tombs buried underground), exudes an aroma that transcends the nostalgic temptation. And indeed, it leads us to a swooning spatio-temporal reality paralleled with our mundanity.
In this reality, our protagonist Arthur (a slovenly O’Connor awashed with unassumingly, sympathetic vibes), an English lad endowed with a gift of rhabdomancy (not for water, but Etruscan tombs), is recently released from the joint and still not recovered from the death of his girlfriend Beniamina (Vianello), whose causation is never revealed. Returning to his old habitat, Arthur reconnect with Beniamina’s grandmother Flora (a liver spots and lentigines covered Rossellini), who seems oblivious of her granddaughter’s fate, and shares a strange connection with Italia (a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Duarte), a Brazilian woman who is Flora’s new singing student but also moonlights as the housekeeper of the dilapidated mansion Flora lives, where she also manages to hide her two children without Flora’s knowledge.
It is business as usual for Arthur and his gang of tomb diggers, who have no qualms about pulling the wool over a local hayseed’s eyes and keep their sepulchral findings to themselves, conversely they are also prone to be cozened by the wily antique dealer Spartaco (Alba Rohrwacher). Arthur has a falling-out with his gang after a numinous meditation associated with the time-preserved artifacts they discover (“they are too beautiful for human eyes”), drifting in and out of Italia’s life like a phantom, finally trapped in a realm that is beyond life and death, connected only by a red thread that may lead him to his beloved Beniamina. LA CHIMERA is abruptly brought to a close that seems to suggest Arthur is stuck in the limbo, another opaque soul weighed down by his preternatural gift.
After THE WONDERS (2014) and HAPPY AS LAZZARO (2018), Rohrwacher becomes more and more at ease incorporating the specific folkways into her free-spirited narrative (the Epiphany celebration sequences are as if snatched from a time warp). A villanella-style minstrel melodiously offers a capsule comment on Arthur’s singularity and kismet. Decay seeps through those immemorial buildings and counterpoints the deathlessness of Etruscan artifacts, which otherwise echoes Arthur’s spiritual hang-up that is detached from other people’s secular concerns. LA CHIMERA is dense in its deference to the immortality and the endless human resistance of not reconciling with the limitations of “the world as we know it”, which is sublimely embodied by O’Connor’s Arthur. A wandering entity who has little purchase in the real world and leaves indelible marks to those fortuitous ones he encounters, continuing Rohrwacher’s hot streak of consecrating the ultimate human goodness, which is revitalized with a new breath of life out of its apparent banality.
referential entries: Rohrwacher’s HAPPY AS LAZZARO (2018, 8.5/10); THE WONDERS (2014, 7.1/10).
Cinema Omnivore 