Summary

• La Chimera presents a complex story centered on Arthur, an archaeologist with a deep connection to the past and a struggle to embrace the present.
• The film explores themes of our relationship with the past, supernatural elements, and the blurred lines between reality, myth, and dreams.
• La Chimera challenges viewers to consider the impact of living in the past or present, capturing the essence of longing for an ideal life that may be out of reach.

Writing about La Chimera in the concise, linear format of a review is a real challenge for me. Not because it's especially opaque or impenetrable; on the contrary, it makes for quite welcoming viewing. But the new Italian movie from writer-director Alice Rohrwacher is alive in the way great art can sometimes be. Its ideas are many, and its way of exploring them encourages an open, active mind. Trying to lock it into the rigid language of description, I fear, would sacrifice the forest for the trees.

I feel as if I was led into one of La Chimera's many Etruscan tombs, and as I wandered through the dark by candlelight, I kept discovering new rooms, each with their own treasures. Now, after returning to the surface, I'm being asked to map and catalog the place from memory. The movie is so interested in archeology (the credits dedicate it "to all archeologists, custodians of every end") that it becomes an analogue for the viewing experience. Rohrwacher asks us to interpret La Chimera the way archaeologists interpret fragments of the past.

La Chimera's Story Is All Centered On Josh O'Connor's Arthur

But he's only the beginning of a more intricate story

Arthur (Josh O'Connor), the protagonist, offers the simplest entry point. When we meet the Englishman, in 1980s Tuscany, he is on a train to the town of Riparbella. Information comes to us gradually, piece by piece; he is returning after having spent some time in prison. He is an archaeologist of sorts, who leads a misfit group of graverobbers ("tombaroli") who illegally sell Etruscan artifacts to a fence going by Spartaco. This, naturally, is what led to his brief incarceration.

Apart from his activities, he has a benefactor in Flora (Isabella Rossellini), the aging matriarch of a family of daughters who lives in a grand but decaying house in the hills. The fiery woman has only the kindest words for him; he was beloved by Beniamina (Yile Vianello), who may have been her favorite child. Though Flora speaks as if she could return at any moment, the faces people make as she talks tell us Beniamina's gone somewhere she can't come back from. Arthur does not speak of her, but dwells on her in dreams.

When he arrives at Flora's, he meets Italia (Carol Duarte), a Portuguese woman who is ostensibly Flora's live-in singing student, but is functionally more like an unpaid helper. The arrangement suits Italia fine – she's secretly keeping her two children with her in the house. She takes an interest in Arthur, and he, somewhat reluctantly, lets her. They develop a friendship unlike the others in his life, and there's a spark between them that could become something more, should they be open to it.

Here emerges Arthur's central conflict, which O'Connor carries in his pensive performance. He is drawn to the past (perhaps more than metaphorically). His fellow tombaroli are in this game for the money, the thrill, and the camaraderie. They lack Arthur's reverence, and he doesn't fully share in their joy. They, and Italia, live in the present, even daring to keep one eye on the future. One way to understand La Chimera is as Arthur's process of discovering whether he, too, can turn his gaze away from lost loves and dead civilizations.

La Chimera Is All About Our Relationship With The Past

Rohrwacher doesn't prescribe one way to see it

La chimera is, above all, about how we engage with the past, and Arthur is only the place where the movie's many themes intersect. To trace a new branch, Rohrwacher makes space for more lenses than just archeology. The tombaroli lend no special weight to the Etruscan tombs beyond their potential value, but most locals are deeply superstitious about disturbing the dead. When they approach Arthur about potential finds, they do so nervously. They hope for riches without the haunting that could come with them.

The movie's characters have an ideal life they'd like to realize, something they're chasing. Arthur, though similarly compelled, seems unsure of exactly what he's after.

Their fears, dismissed by Arthur's friends, aren't dismissed by the film. Arthur's ion for ancient relics is paired with a supposed gift for uncovering them – with a dowsing rod. There is room for different understandings of whether this ability is real, or a performance masking his educated sense of what to look for. But he is always right, even when he isn't searching on purpose. Sometimes, when he's in the right spot, the movie responds by flipping the frame upside down, as if he can see what's hiding underground the way we can see the stars.

So, the supernatural is in play. Maybe. La Chimera also engages with myth and dreams, and it's not always easy to sort things into "real" and "not real." Scenes that, at a story level, show no sign of strangeness often feel unreal, in a poetic, Felliniesque way. This is the key to its magic. As much as Rohrwacher is exploring all these ways of framing the past, her movie is also putting those same frames around its '80s setting. The world of the film is at once a grounded, tactile reality and a fantasy with hazy borders.

This finds its root in the title, the meaning of which in Italian is analogous to a pipe dream. There's a utopian connotation to it, and the film flirts with this idea at times, especially in its depiction of groups of happy people. The movie's characters have an ideal life they'd like to realize, something they're chasing. Arthur, though similarly compelled, seems unsure of exactly what he's after. He just knows it's behind him.

Despite having so much left of La Chimera to explore, I've returned to where I started – but with new eyes. Arthur's struggle to choose between living in the past or the present is in part an expression of what can happen when a person (or a people, or a society) consigns their utopia to history. Together, Rohrwacher and O'Connor capture what it feels like when one's ideal life is out of reach, not because it's impossible, but because it already came and went.

This would be a remarkable accomplishment for any film. That it's just one of many in La Chimera bodes well for viewers who decide to excavate the chambers of it this review had to leave untouched.

La Chimera released theatrically in the US on Friday, March 29. The film is 130 minutes long and is not currently rated.