La Chimera
2023 · Alice Rohrwacher
Everyone has their own Chimera, something they try to achieve but never manage to find. For Arthur, the Chimera looks like the woman he lost, Beniamina. In an adventurous journey between the living and the dead, between forests and cities, between celebrations and solitudes, the intertwined destinies of these characters unfold, all in search of the Chimera.
dir. Alice Rohrwacher · 2023
Alice Rohrwacher completes the loose triptych begun with The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro with this shaggy, sun-cracked fable about tombaroli — the grave robbers who loot Etruscan tombs along the Tyrrhenian coast of a scuffed 1980s Italy. Josh O'Connor, rumpled and grieving in a dirty linen suit, plays Arthur, an Englishman with a dowser's gift for sensing what lies beneath; Isabella Rossellini presides over a crumbling villa full of singing students. Rohrwacher is the great contemporary heir to Italian cinema's fabulist line — Fellini's carnival, Olmi's peasant piety, Pasolini's sacred profane — and her signature is a handmade roughness: with cinematographer Hélène Louvart she mixes 35mm, 16mm and Super 16, lets scenes crank up to silent-comedy speed, lets characters glance at the camera. Beneath the picaresque sits a serious question about what a culture owes its dead, and who has the right to touch what was buried with love. The image that lingers is a red thread, dangling somewhere between this world and the other one.
Lines of influence
- La Strada (1954) — Supplies the itinerant picaresque-fable template — a wanderer moving town to town as episodic tableaux — that structures Arthur's dowsing circuit among the tombaroli.
- The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966) — Episodic road-fable that yokes broad Totò slapstick to Franciscan allegory, the exact sacred-comic register Rohrwacher inherits for her ragtag grave-robbers.
- Mamma Roma (1962) — Frontal, Renaissance-painting framing of the Roman sub-proletariat that sacralizes the profane margins — Pasolini's iconographic staging La Chimera quotes in its tomb tableaux.
- The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) — Casts local non-professionals and uses available-light, grainy naturalism to consecrate peasant labor, the earthy ensemble method behind Rohrwacher's tombaroli crew.
- Amarcord (1973) — Carnivalesque provincial ensemble punctuated by fourth-wall-breaking narrators — the direct-address device Rohrwacher deploys via her singing ballad-chorus.
- Sherlock Jr. (1924) — Model of undercranked, sped-up silent slapstick — the in-camera fast-motion Rohrwacher uses to turn the tomb-robbers' scrambles into comic ballet.
- Orphée (1950) — Renders the Orphic descent and mirror-threshold to the underworld with in-camera trickery — the liminal crossing figured by La Chimera's red thread to the dead.
- Miracle in Milan (1951) — Neorealist-fable hybrid where the destitute touch the miraculous, using practical in-camera magic effects grafted onto documentary streets.
- Journey to Italy (1954) — Its Pompeii-excavation of the embracing ancient dead binds archaeology to grief and the sacred — the Rossellinian lineage Isabella Rossellini literally carries into the film.
- Corpo Celeste (2011) — Rohrwacher's debut establishing the 16mm handheld, observational Calabrian realism and sacred/profane theme her later fables refine.
- The Wonders (2014) — Celluloid-shot rural family idyll with non-professional children and a fabulist TV-pageant intrusion — her signature mix of documentary texture and magic.
- Happy as Lazzaro (2018) — Same DP Hélène Louvart's mixed-gauge Super 16 grain, a holy-fool protagonist and a time-slippage fable structure — the direct formal predecessor to La Chimera.
- The Lost Daughter (2021) — Showcases collaborator Hélène Louvart's restless, skin-close handheld camera — the same shooting method that gives La Chimera its intimate instability.
- Beach Rats (2017) — Louvart again working in soft, grainy 16mm to make bodies and light tactile — the DP's analog-texture approach shared across Rohrwacher's palette.
- God's Own Country (2017) — Draws the same mud-and-hands, inarticulate rural physicality from Josh O'Connor that Rohrwacher casts as Arthur's grief-worn body.
- Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) — Renders a porous membrane between the living and the dead on grainy celluloid, letting spirits arrive without spectacle — kindred to La Chimera's duty-to-the-dead liminality.
- Tale of Tales (2015) — Contemporary Italian fabulism reviving folk-tale grotesquerie through practical, analog craft rather than digital effect, a parallel revival of the national fable tradition.