Movie Review: 'La Chimera'

La Chimera (2023)

Directed by Alice Rohrwacher

Written by Alice Rohrwacher

Starring Josh O'Connor, Carol Duarte, Vincenzo Nemolato

Release Date December 6th, 2023

Published December 15th, 2023

The great catch up continues with a film that made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival back in May of this year. La Chimera tells the story of an English Archaeologist who falls in with a group of grave robbers in a small Italian village. As we join the story, the archaeologist is fresh out of jail after having been arrested for robbing a grave and selling the stolen treasure. Arthur, the archaeologist, played by Josh O'Connor, wants to leave the life of a grave robber behind but finds himself drawn back into this criminal world out a lack of being able to do anything else.

Arthur is disgraced, an ex-pat, the only people he knows are the grave robbers who recruited and befriended him years ago. Without them, his only tether to the world is the loving mother of his late, missing, ex-girlfriend Beniamina, Flora, played by Isabella Rossellini. Is Beniamina dead? Has she just wandered off on her own, as her Flora hopes and believes? The movie will answer this question eventually. Meanwhile, as Arthur tries to find a way to avoid going back to jail and he finds himself drawn to Italia (Carole Duarte), a student of Flora's who also acts as a servant to the elderly woman and her gaggle of unforgiving daughters.

Italia is carrying a secret. While staying in this decaying mansion as student and servant, she's also hiding her two children in one of the many, many rooms in this ancient home. She has a baby and a pre-teen and seems to pick up strays as the movie goes along. Arthur, being a bit of a stray himself, might have a place to land with Italia if he can give up his grave robbing. Arthur seems to want to quit but he's also drawn to the remarkable and incredible works of art that are buried with those who died in the Ancient Italian Etruscan era. Even while he was imprisoned, Arthur dreamed about the items he'd pulled out of the ground and kept for himself, his last connections to his time as a legitimate archaeologist.

Arthur eventually returns to the life of a grave robber out of a sense of inertia. He desires change but his grief and his disconnection from the world, leads him to the path of least resistance, a life that welcomes him, favors him, a rare place in the world where he is respected. Arthur has a strange talent. He can locate a grave filled with treasure using dowsing. Dowsing is a mostly debunked form of locating things underground. For the purpose of the movie, whether Arthur is a bit of a con man or if he genuinely has a magical talent, he uses a stick to point to a place in the ground where treasure is located. It just also happens to a place where death is located.

Death lingers over the entirety of La Chimera. Whether it is from the graves that Arthur helps locate and rob or the death of Beniamina which is hinted at throughout the film. Director Alice Rohrwacher uses lovely, elegant visuals to illustrate Beniamina's fate and Arthur's hallucinatory memories of her, her beauty, and the clear devastation he feels having lost her, either to death or otherwise. A red string from her unusual dress is caught on something on the ground and grows longer as Arthur revisits the memory of it. The dreaminess of these scenes gives way to further melancholy as we reach the end and Arthur reaches a definitive end to his story.

Chimera has a couple of definitions. It's mostly related to Greek Mythology, an Animal made of different parts of different animals, a mutt monster if you will. But it also has a second definition, a person who has cells from two different sources, two sets of DNA. Both definitions are rather perfect for Arthur. He's English living in Italy and carrying both of those countries as his home, seemingly at home in each. But the mythological meaning also fits as a metaphor for the different things that come together to make Arthur who he is. He's a man of good education, an archaeologist. He's also a criminal, a grave robber. He's both in love and heart broken and the women in his life, the one he lost and the potential newly arrived love, make up pieces of him.

He's not a monster, per se, but he commits a crime that is monstrous in the eyes of many, including Italia who witnesses his talent for dowsing and finding a grave to rob and curses him for it. His many shames, whether it's related to going to jail, losing Beniamina, or offending Italia, he seems to wear like a second skin. He's always a little dirty and rumpled and wearing the same suit that he wore when he went to jail and when was released from jail, it appears to be the only clothing he owns and it appears stuck to his body like a representation of his shame, guilt, and unending sadness.

That's just my reading of La Chimera and the way Arthur is presented. The movie unfolds in a relatively straightforward way that leaves the inferring and interpretation up to the audience. You are given clues regarding how writer-director Alice Rohrwacher wants you to interpret the story being told but the film is not at all pushy or manipulative toward helping you arrive at an interpretation. This includes the ending of the film and Arthur's fate as he abandons the comfort of one life for the tragedy of his other life and finds a kind of closure that befits the story that Rohrwacher has been unfolding. It's open to interpretation perhaps, but it appeared quite clear to me what happened to Arthur.

I was moved by La Chimera. Arthur's nomadic, lost existence, his soul deep sense of being lost in a world that only makes sense when he's dealing with ancient artifacts and long dead individuals. It's a deeply melancholy story but a remarkably compelling story nonetheless. Arthur's alienation is familiar and haunting for anyone who feels untethered to the world around them, a stranger in a strange land seeking peace and comfort wherever they can find it. That's a remarkably relatable feeling and Rohrwacher captures that feeling beautifully in La Chimera.

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