131 min | NR | March 29, 2024 | Neon
Arthur leads a gang of grave robbers across 1980s central Italy, dowsing for Etruscan tombs with a forked stick and a death wish. He is hunting for buried treasure. He is really hunting for a door to the dead.
Arthur is an English drifter in 1980s central Italy, fresh out of a short prison stretch. He leads a gang of tombaroli, the grave robbers who plunder Etruscan tombs and sell the sacred objects into a hidden art market. Arthur carries a forked dowsing stick and a gift. He senses the void of a buried chamber and faints into it. La Chimera presents itself as a caper about looting the dead. It is really a film about a man who robs the dead because he is trying to reach one of them.
Josh O’Connor plays Arthur in a filthy white linen suit, half-present and half-elsewhere. He moves through the daylight world like a man waiting for night, mourning a lost love named Beniamina. Carol Duarte plays Italia, a music student with no ear for the notes and a houseful of secret children. She insists on the living while Arthur stays fixed on the buried. Isabella Rossellini plays Flora, Beniamina’s mother, holding court in a crumbling villa and refusing to admit her daughter is gone. Alba Rohrwacher turns up as Spartaco, the unseen dealer who finally steps into the light and gives the racket its bored corporate face.
Alice Rohrwacher writes and directs, and she builds the film out of mismatched film stock. Cinematographer Hélène Louvart shoots on 35mm and 16mm, switching gauges and aspect ratios so the image keeps changing weight under you. When the robbers scramble through the night, Rohrwacher undercranks the camera and they scurry like figures in a silent comedy. When Arthur dowses, the frame flips upside down, the sky becomes the underworld, and the trick lands as both joke and theology. A trio of folk singers wanders in to narrate the tombaroli in ballad form, turning the gang into legend while they are still alive. The result feels excavated rather than shot.
La Chimera works as both a heist picture and a ghost story, and Rohrwacher refuses to let either mode win. The Etruscans buried their dead with everything they would need on the other side. Arthur and his crew dig those gifts up and price them, and the film knows exactly what that desecration costs. The chimera of the title is the impossible thing Arthur chases, the threshold between the world above and the world below. He spends the film convinced that treasure and grief are the same hole in the ground. Rohrwacher lets him find out.