New York Film Festival 2023

[Chris Knipp]

ALICE ROHRWACHER: LA CHIMERA (2023)


JOSH O'CONNOR IN LA CHIMERA

Etruscan treasures that tempt and cloy

Alice Rohrwacher, whose older sister Alba is a famous Italian actress, has received much favorable recognition for her earlier films, Corpo Celeste (2011), The Wonders (2014), and Happy as Lazzaro (2018), all of which were included in the New York Film Festival, like this one. Her new one, set in the Tuscan countryside in the nineteen eighties, centers on a young British archaeologist who gets involved in an international network of stolen Etruscan artifacts during the 1980s.

La Chimera was greeted at Cannes as "enchanting" (Guy
Lodge inVariety) and "uproarious" and "captivating" and as a film that "teems with life," receiving one of only two five-star ratings from Bradshaw at this year's Cannes. It's a rollicking fantasy that features Josh O'Connor as the rather disheveled English archeologist now teamed up with a Felliniesque gang of grave-robbers who falls in love with the gone daughter of Isabella Rossellini. Watch the TRAILER and see if it's your kind of thing. (Rohrwacher has evoked the colorful, populist chaos of classic Italian directors before, De Sica, Zavattini and the Taviani brothers, as well as Fellini.) She also recently directed the series of Elena Ferrante's "My Brilliant Friend" ("L'amica geniale") for Italian television, with her sister Alba as the narrator.

The fantasy of supernatural element survives here in that Arthur (O'Connor's character) uses dowsihg rods to find Etruscan tombs. He is treated by the local artifact thieves or tomb robbers as a wise man, a magical savant. On the other hand when he arrives by train, coming from jail tlme, a ride when he is "outed" as a bad man by passengers who leve him alone in a compartment b himself, sporting a rough prison haircut and a dirty (though well cut) white linen suit, he looks generally scruffy and that only grows throughout the film. He finds what may be a rundown castle, a big room presided over by Flora (Isabella Rossellini) in a wheel chair, feeling "old," (and occasionally speaking English to Arthur. There are young women including Italia (Brazilian actress Carol Duare), and an unseen presence, Beniamina, Flora's daughter and allegedly Arthur's lost love, somehow lost from the world of the living. As usual Alice's sister Alba is present as Frida.

What Rohrwacher does here is similar to her last feature: she has us pass the time with her people and join their world. It is a warm and engaging, it's Italian, friendly, intimate, aided by square format and 16mm images; but not much is happening. One persistent image is of Arthur smoking a lot of cigarettes and continually searching for an "accendino," which is Italian for lighter. O'Connor functions well in Italian, suggesting he's been here for a while, though it's pointed out that he could use Italian lessons: for instance he misstates the ending of "occhi," the word for eyes. He has picked up the accent well. We see him and the mismatched miscreants - including a bawdy transvestite gang straight out of Fellini, seen in a street parade - who serve (or use?) him, finding little Etruscan objects and selling caches of them to a wholesale buyer who will sell them to collectors.

It's only after a lot of desultory messing about that this film develops a plot. Rohrwacher is more about situation and atmosphere here. But it's at such atmosphere, at sublimely intimate chaos, that Rohrwacher excels. When something happens, it involves finding Etruscan tombs, particularly a large untapped one, another world that redefines Arthur's relation to reality or to time and space, to his function in life.

The trouble is, backgrounds are patchy. How did Arthur wind up leading this seedy existence? who was Beniamina? The director is wonderful at surface detail but leaves out connective tissue. What she is talking about here, though, is clear, and has resonance with the whole Italian dilemma: living, as Tuscans do, and Romans, and Italians all over the country, with a cultural wealth so rich you can just plunge a shovel in the ground and you find it. As the always perceptive Peter Bradshaw puts it, "It can be plundered for the present day artefacts and spirits raised from the dead, but at the cost of incurring a terrible sadness: a feeling of surrounding yourself with ghosts." Italians live off their past and are weighed down by it.

La Chimera, 130 mins., debuted at Cannes in competition. Screened for this review as part of the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival, where it shows Oct. 7 and 8, 2023 with Q&A's with Alice Rohrwacher. It will be released in the US by Neon Nov. 23, 2023. Metacritic rating: 88%.