Review: La chimera
- CANNES 2023: Alice Rohrwacher gets back to marginalised characters with a touch of Etruscan mystery, by way of a dowser-esque stranger who joins forces with a gang of grave robbers in 1980s Italy
“Arthur was looking for a ride to the afterworld”. There’s a brief moment in La chimera [+see also:
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film profile], better known as the young and introverted Prince Charles in the series The Crown – is a stranger we know nothing about and who doesn’t talk that much. He’s returning to central Italy to live in a hovel on the fringes of a suburb in Tuscia, on the Tyrrhenian Sea, which is the hometown of his beloved Beniamina (Yle Vianello) who’s no longer of this world. It’s the 1980s and Arthur has joined a shabby group of “grave robbers”, who loot ancient archaeological sites for the illegal art market. He’s revered – and exploited – by his tomb-rider friends for his dowser-esque ability to excavate Etruscan graves armed with a simple forked stick. It doesn’t matter to him that, one day, when they’re followed by the Carabinieri, they leave him behind and he ends up in prison. And he doesn’t care about the money. The only thing he’s interested in is admiring the beauty of those magnificent jewels they find among the funerary objects in Etruscan women’s graves, before they’re sold to elusive dealer Spartacus. His only alternative to stealing fibulas is visiting Beniamina’s distraught mother, Flora (Isabella Rossellini).
Rohrwacher pursues her trademark documentary-derived cinema where the landscape reflects an evolving culture with its mutations and contradictions. With ultra-modern, anthropological instinct, the director depicts the relationship binding her characters to their environment, which they move in and with which they clash. “I very much like transitional characters and periods” (according to an interview which appeared in Sight & Sound n. 25, 2015): in The Wonders [+see also:
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film profile] (awarded the Grand Prize in Cannes 2014), it was Wolfgang, the “foreign body”, who was the transitional character, with his family and post-utopian illusions; here, it’s Arthur and the gang of proud, young plunderers manipulated by big-time art traffickers. Rohrwacher offers up historical and social memories, and defends the otherness of her marginalised characters, her “ghosts of history” (as quoted from an interview in Cinéaste n. 4, 2015). But instead of melancholic nostalgia for those “worlds apart”, for lost rurality with all its folkloric manifestations, we feel disenchantment observing the loss of a sense of identity and of belonging to a culture. When we witness the formation of a small community of women-mothers and children, we don’t delude ourselves that this hippy experiment will survive, because we know how things turned out over the next thirty years.
Rohrwacher uses three film formats – the precision of 35 mm to highlight the nuances of the tomb frescos, which almost make us think of Sergej Paradžanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates, the body and dynamism of Super 16 mm, and the amateurish and dreamy characteristics of 16mm – as she follows the adventures of the substantial cast (which includes Carol Duarte, Vincenzo Nemolato, Lou Roy Lecollinet, Giuliano Mantovani and, in an unusual role, the director’s sister Alba Rohrwacher), without lingering too much on the nature of the characters and their relationships – as she did in The Wonders and in Happy As Lazzaro [+see also:
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film profile]. Instead, she places the film in an otherworldly dimension, akin to the mysterious, lost Etruscan civilisation. Arthur holds himself accountable for Beniamina’s death and follows the thread of Ariadne held out by his lover, travelling ever deeper into the World of Spirits, almost wanting the ground above to close in over him, a symbolic representation of grief as we know it.
La chimera is produced by tempesta together with RAI Cinema, in co-production with French firms Ad Vitam Production and ARTE France Cinéma, and Switzerland’s Amka Films Productions and RSI. Germany firm The Match Factory are managing international sales.
(Translated from Italian)
Photogallery 27/05/2023: Cannes 2023 - La chimera
23 pictures available. Swipe left or right to see them all.
© 2023 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
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