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A Sad-Eyed Josh O’Connor Goes Tomb-Raiding in the Lovely, Mysterious La Chimera
Alice Rohrwacher’s playful, rambling new film follows a man who robs graves to find his way into the next world.
He lives in a makeshift shack — you can’t really call it a home — built against the ramparts of an old town, but he spends more time, it seems, in the elegant villa belonging to Flora (Isabella Rossellini), an aging matriarch and music teacher and the mother of the oft-mentioned, mostly unseen Beniamina, a long-lost love of Arthur’s. La Chimera often recalls the work of Rohrwacher’s Tuscan compatriots, the late Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, most notably in a scene during which an argument between the tombaroli and one of their patrons descends into animal noises and inchoate grunts. We can also see nods to the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini, filmmakers who regularly mined the collision between postwar Italy’s boom-and-bust cycles and the stony solidity of its classical heritage.
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