Italy • Comedy/Drama/Fantasy • Year: 2023 • Running time: 130 mins
Languages: Italian • English • French • Portugese
Synopsis:
Everyone has their own Chimera, something they try to achieve but never manage to find. For the band of tombaroli, thieves of ancient grave goods and archaeological wonders, the Chimera means redemption from work and the dream of easy wealth. For Arthur, the Chimera looks like, Benjamina, the woman he lost. To find her, Arthur will challenge the invisible and search everywhere for the door to the afterlife of which myths speak.
Not just great, but expansive: it shows new ways a movie can be.
Esmé Holden: Little White Lies
Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Happy As Lazarro (2018) • The Wonders (2014) • Corpo Celeste (2011)
Writers: Alice Rohrwacher • Carmela Covino • Marco Pettenello
Main Cast:
| Josh O’Connor | Arthur |
| Carol Duarte | Italia |
| Vincenzo Nemolato | Pirro |
| Isabella Rossellini | Flora |
| Alba Rohrwacher | Spartaco |
(for full cast list, additional technical information and reviews, please visit the La Chimera pages in IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes).
Film Notes:
La Chimera, loosely translated in this context as ‘The Impossible Dream’, greatly impressed the Guardian’s film critic, Wendy Ide, as well as many others. Ide wrote glowingly about Alice Rohrwacher’s latest film, and especially the acting performance of Josh O’Connor. He is a renegade British archaeologist in 1980s Tuscany. In his “ghostly, off-white suit, its grubby linen the colour of a recently disinterred shroud, [Arthur] looks like a fallen angel from a Caravaggio painting.” Although the part was originally written for a man in his 40s or 50s, O’Connor’s early 30s makes the part work, convincing as the de facto leader of a rowdy and disreputable band of grave robbers, or ‘tombaroli’.
Rohrwacher’s last film was ‘Happy As Lazarro’ (2018) which we narrowly failed to have in the CFC programme. Just as Lazarro was “an ageless innocent, blithely wandering across decades in a matter of moments”, so these qualities of playing with time characterise Arthur and his emergence from a mysterious past (has he been in prison?) and his hold over the gang. “The story itself is a slippery, sinuous thing, as elusive as the chimera of the title” argues Wendy Ide.
The film’s riches come from Rohrwacher’s seemingly inexhaustible wealth of ideas: the tactile, textual quality that results from dipping into different film stocks (cinematographer Helene Louvant shoots on 35mm, Super 16mm and 16mm); the sped-up footage that defuses the intensity of Arthur’s anger towards his friends; the use of an itinerant balladeer to narrate chunks of the story. Then there is the dishevelled, impromptu quality of some of the music – a village band, honking its carnival anthems on battered brass instruments, contrasting with a fantastic tomb-raiding montage set to Kraftwerk’s electro-pop classic ‘Spacelab’.
The audience at the 76th Cannes Film Festival in 2023, where it premiered and competed for the Palme d’Or, clearly was also impressed with La Chimera, giving it a nine minute standing ovation. CFC hopes you also enjoy it.