La Chimera Review

Evan D.

Alice Rohrwacher’s last feature, Happy as Lazzaro, has grown in my estimation more than just about any film of 2018, in part because of the way she infuses a fantastical surrealism into otherwise ordinary sequences of life in the Italian countryside. Somewhere between a dream and a nightmare for both the audience and the characters, Rohrwacher’s stories often double as cinematic hypnotism. With La Chimera the Italian auteur, another fable centered on a sort of plundering of rural Italy, uses this same mysticism to explore the holes we dig ourselves into in service of the past. 

Fresh out of jail, disheveled Englishman Arthur (Josh O’Connor) returns to his ramshackle hut and his former crew of grave robbers that left him out to dry in a heist gone wrong. Back on the streets, Arthur claims to want to get away from that old life but his past keeps beckoning. In sleep memories of a lost lover flood his mind while his waking hours are haunted by the clamor of his old friends attempting to draw him back to the life he’s trying to leave behind. All the while, Arthur finds more angelic influence in the form of Flora (Isabella Rossellini,) the mother of his former girlfriend and her live-in student Italia (Carol Duarte.) Still, Arthur cannot resist the chimeras that call him to the long lost graves of Etruscans hidden just beneath his feet and the hope that their tombs might hold some treasure that would finally fill the void of loss within him.

Rohrwacher heightens the divides within Arthur by blending moments of reality on 35mm film with Super 16 sequences evocative of the dreams that overtake him. Spirited folk songs give voice to the conflicted actions of the grave diggers. Humor and sight gags give levity to a film that might otherwise be weighed by a heavy subject matter. Nobody else working today is making this kind of modern fable quite like Rohrwacher.

At the heart of La Chimera is O’Connor, wearing the weariness of his character like its a piece of costume then deftly shedding it when his Arthur is jolted awake by the beckoning of the dead. The brightness and hope Duarte brings with her portrayal of Italia contrasts sharply with the shadowy hallows of those shrines to grief that call out to Arthur. She grants to Arthur the sort of kindness and forgiveness he cannot bestow upon himself. Unsurprisingly, Rossellini too is excellent as the flip side of Arthur’s grieving, feigning ignorance while he desperately searches for a way to turn back fate. 

Pulled together La Chimera paints the picture of a man shattered by grief, chasing the remnants of death so furiously that he can no longer go on living. Arthur is so determined to live in the past that he’s made it his illicit obsession. Dark and sad as it may be, its hard not to root for him still. A hopeless mission to rediscover the tiniest piece of what once made him happy. So Arthur lives out his existence in Rohrwacher’s dreamlike valley between life and death. La Chimera is another work of everyday myth making from one of modern cinema’s great dream weavers. 8/10