She sits in the Museum of the island now, focused intently upon her own inner life, gravely meditating upon the works of time. So long as we are in this place we will not be free from her; it is as if our thoughts must be forever stained by some of her own dark illumination…
— Lawrence Durrell, Reflections On a Marine Venus
I gaze at the white rocks the mute sources of the winds
And the stillness of the firmaments
And the swollen rivers that go on weeping
And the shadows of human work curved there on the gelid hills
And still across tender skies distant bright shadows running
And still I call you I call you Chimera.
— Dino Campana, “The Chimera” (trans. Luigi Bonaffini)
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The tombaroli are a curious lot. There is something of the profane about them: ne’er-do-wells who loot historical zones for profit, uncaring of their (often damaging) passage into cemeteries and sacred sites. What of it, if the grave they rob is of a long-dead child, or if the altar they shatter was devoted to a once-revered goddess? There is money to be made, wealthy collectors to bargain with and satisfy, etc. And so the dead, and their divines, are desecrated.
But there is money to be made, and certain other needs—beyond the preferences of the social elite—are satisfied. Who are we to judge if, in the end, it is work that lifts a particular class of workers out of destitution? What do the dead care of the activities of the living? They, along with any gods, are gone.
This is, at least, the dichotomy set up by Alice Rohrwacher in her 2023 Italian-language film La Chimera. It is also a film about Beauty, its imprint across fading facades and physical lineages; about history, as well, which is both material and immaterial, although its invisible pressures clearly burden some more than others. It is a film set in the 20th century, with 20th century backdrops and sounds and issues; but Josh O’Connor’s Arthur (Artur, as his tomb-raiding compatriots call him) is every bit the Orpheus, death-haunted and in search of a love he cannot retrieve.
He enters the film as a sort of vagabond, well-dressed yet disheveled, having been temporarily jailed as a result of a foiled tombaroli operation. His friends, a merry band of misfits, left him behind, and the beginning of La Chimera is their attempt to bring him back into their good graces. He is an Englishman, but possesses a working familiarity with Italian, and has a background in archaeology—his true passion, along with a beautiful woman who flits in and out of memory and light-hearted conversation.
In a stroke of magical realism, he has the power to sense buried sites, whether they be tombs or shrines; thus, whether or not the tombaroli hold any genuine affection towards Arthur, he is their moneymaker, which, in addition to his foreignness, can only further alienate him.
There is also a family of several daughters, headed by an old matriarch (Isabella Rossellini) who cannot accept that one of her brood, and Arthur’s great love, Beniamina, has passed. She and Arthur are united by this (for his part, tacit) refusal. She has taken on a student, Italia (Carol Duarte), whom she knows is tone-deaf but takes advantage of, anyway, so that she might have a live-in maid as well. Arthur and Italia’s gradual connection is only another added element to the tension he feels between what was and what is.
This is the central conflict of the film, beyond its more superficial, caper-like plot points. A chimera is an impossible dream, a vain hope, which is nevertheless chased after. This utter irreconcilability defines Arthur—in his soiled white suit, tramping around the Italian countryside, he cuts a shade-like figure, like some upright funereal form—and the culture Rohrwacher was raised in and portrays. Surrounded by artifacts of the past, buried and unburied, do the tombaroli and the patrons they cater to not respect the holy places of their ancestors? Or, as their descendants, are they not entitled to do with them as they wish?
Not only does Rohrwacher survey the history of her native region—with the ancient Etruscans being of particular note—she also makes La Chimera itself function as a mini-survey of cinematic history. She switches between different film stocks throughout, even utilizing a silent-era technique like undercranking for some chase sequences, in which the actions of onscreen figures appear sped-up (lending an old-fashioned comedic air); when Beniamina features in Arthur’s memory, Rohrwacher uses Super 16 to provide an effect of personalized nostalgia. It is, on the whole, a very beautifully filmed project (with cinematography helmed by Hélène Louvart), not the least due to its being shot in a classically beautiful, rustic locale.
The cast (the vast majority being Italian) is excellent, and it is nice to see Isabella Rossellini acting in a substantial role this far into her career, but the standouts really are the Englishman Josh O’Connor and Brazilian Carol Duarte. The vibe, here, is lowkey and naturalistic, so O’Connor and Duarte must not ham it up, although Arthur functions as an almost mythical character, and Duarte’s Italia is gawky, awkward, and easy to caricaturize. It is Italia’s earnestness that wins the viewer’s affections, as well as her amiable pluck; and when she derides the tombaroli for breaking into a site by the sea, she becomes a mouthpiece for certain reservations that, up till then, have gone unvoiced. These are not, by the director’s own admission, complex character portraits, but enough life is breathed into them by their performers that to watch them act is to appreciate the skillful application of subtleties.
The seaside scene is worth returning to, as it is one of the film’s best. Rohrwacher opts to place her camera inside the subterranean chamber as the tombaroli penetrate. The quietness there is the quietness of untouched millennia, and it is almost disconcerting to hear it broken by their shovels, and Arthur’s stumbles. They discover that it is not a tomb, but a shrine, one dedicated to a naked goddess, around whose ankles curves a stone panther. It is the discovery of a lifetime. Arthur and his crew are awed, although, as will be made clear, for very different reasons.
Rewatching this moment, I was reminded of Lawrence Durrell’s sun-soaked travel memoir of Rhodes, Reflections On a Marine Venus, and of how that once-submerged figure seemed to act as the presiding genius of the island, providing it a kind of antique profundity that the modern era can only suffer in comparison to. Arthur, here, is stunned by something of that same sublimity, and cannot treat the goddess like his money-hungry compatriots do. It is no small coincidence that the statue’s face seems to also resemble Beniamina’s.
Rohrwacher is very much a contemporary director, but she is schooled in the classics, and with La Chimera is asking the viewer to see history as the present; as in, part of an active continuum in which all things are becoming history. Some of the very last scenes take place in an abandoned, overgrown office building—ruins stand on modern ground, even now. It is worth it, Rohrwacher says, to ask oneself what is special, and what is not; what we can commoditize and what must stand unmolested. It is these questions that plague young Arthur, and we would hear him say them aloud, were it not for the past and its imprisoning flickers.
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