Alice Rohrwacher’s
wonderful La chimera has a predominantly bucolic, sun-baked feel about
it, but it teems with unforced inventiveness and audaciousness. Its central character,
Arthur (Josh O’Connor), is a classically conceived enigma, most often clad in a
rumpled white suit, a trained archaeologist who’s thrown in his lot with a group
of Italian grave robbers, living largely hand to mouth, his behaviour
significantly molded by the memory of his dead love, whose aging mother (Isabella
Rossellini) seems to be his main ongoing human contact. The film is in part a
chronicle of a man rediscovering his own sense of purpose and ethics, by
removing himself from prevailing human timelines and considerations, ultimately
in a sense aligning his own fate with that of the objects he’s plundered and
exploited. But before that scheme fully emerges, Rohrwacher demonstrates her
immense facility, cycling through musical sequences, silly camera tricks, montages
of past escapades that might almost form the credits sequence of a weekly network
show, bits of quasi-magic realism, and some enjoyably broad plotting (the group
is duped into giving up its biggest ever find, via a simple ruse by a rival
gang). The film’s most startling moment comes when the group finds a large
ancient statue of great beauty and immeasurable value, and a member casually
lops off its head (albeit planning to reattach it later) for ease of transport; we subsequently see how such commercial rapaciousness
crafts its own value-creating narratives, with the headless statue ultimately
being marketed to collectors as a “new Venus de Milo.” But partly through his
shock at such desecration, Arthur starts to shift toward a truer version of
himself, and although the ending is objectively grim, it glistens with a sense
of arrival that may surely infiltrate and elevate the viewer.
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