I will admit that my first comment about La Chimera, Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s fourth feature film, is not exactly highbrow but: wow is this movie full of great noses! There is lead actor Josh O’Connor’s prominent prow and Isabella Rossellini’s rather more refined one. And a slew of Italian unknowns bring a few of the Roman variety (naturally!) to proceedings, though the very best belongs to Vincenzo Nemolato, whose wondrous expressions light up every scene he is in. Rohrwacher, who also wrote the script, clearly knows how to cast a good face. Is there a way to justify my superficial opening remarks? Probably: this is a film where characters are constantly trying to sniff something out.
But wait, I don’t have to! In the first scene, Arthur (O’Connor, fresh from the sweaty, sexy Challengers and never better), travelling home to his makeshift cabin in a rural Tuscan town, tells a local girl that her nose looks like one that belongs to someone in an ancient painting. “It’s nice,” he says, though she looks unsure (I might also be uncertain if a stranger on a train said this to me). Never mind, for soon we have arrived in sleepy Riparbella. It is winter and the Eighties, and everyone is dressed like they belong in a language textbook from the Nineties. There is a chill in the air that no-one can shake.
Arthur spends his days visiting Flora (an excellent performance by Rossellini), the mother of his lover, Beniamina (Yile Vianello), who has disappeared. We also meet Italia (Carol Duarte) who takes care of Flora’s decrepit manor in return for singing lessons. Arthur spends his nights... grave-digging. The local area is full of underground Etruscan tombs, filled with treasures that were left to guide and protect the souls of the dead. This is also when the film’s magical realism kicks in: Arthur is a dowser, able to find these burial sites with a divining rod. His rag-tag group of tomb raiders, or the rather more rhythmic tombaroli in Italian – led by the charming and forceful Pirro (Nemolato) – dig the spots up before selling the goods to mysterious local figure Spartaco, who is able to forge provenance documents and sell the cargo at a massive profit to international dealers.
As the film’s title suggests, Arthur is chasing something illusory, a contrast to his co-conspirators, who are well-versed in street smarts: conning locals and evading police custody and charming tourists. That title also brings to mind the Chimera, the mythical, hybrid monster: its fairly traditional parts come together to form a strange whole. Part romance, part comedy, part thriller: La Chimera frequently shifts genres to exciting effect. If your patience occasionally wanes at yet another shot of a ruined manor or O’Connor stroking a flower, Rohrwacher makes up for it in the second half, where a series of reveals makes those images and all these characters about ten times more interesting. The film is long – it certainly feels long – but once you adjust to its pace, you appreciate the director’s frequent detours. I do want to know about this town’s strikingly weird folklore traditions. Tell me more about the veterinary clinic that is a front for illegal trading operations. Flora’s pleasingly horrible daughters? I need details about their plans for their mother’s estate.
It really all does come down to Arthur, this mysterious, constantly-smoking Englishman in a foreign land, who is on a quest to retrieve – what, exactly? His past love? Some greater archaeological finding? A sense of meaning to his transient life? His occasional crises suggest that he still has not found what he is looking for. Perhaps the answer is in embracing all that uncertainty. “Life itself is temporary,” a character says in one of the final scenes, one of this film’s many aphorisms, though by the end of these two hours, Rohrwacher has earned such lines, following through with the most claustrophobic and dazzling final few minutes I’ve witnessed in a cinema this year. Only when the credits began to roll did I realise that, a little like Arthur on his never ending pursuit, I had been holding my breath, waiting for a moment of discovery.
‘La chimera’ is in cinemas 10 May
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
