La Chimera
Directed by Alice Rohrwacher
Running time: 2hrs13 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
The Chimera, starring Josh O’Connor
In Alice Rohrwacher’s new film La Chimera, Josh O’Connor is on rumpled form playing a man who always looks like he’s not had enough sleep, ambling about with the heavy gait of a guy doing a permanent walk of shame. His grubby linen suit is never quite free from wrinkles or the suspicion that the armpits, were you to investigate them, would be stained with sweat. He’s a cigarette stub of a man. Despite all this, he’s still rather attractive.
There’s an earthy quality to Rohrwacher’s filmmaking here, which is entirely appropriate, since this loose, deliciously textured film, set near Rome in the 1980s, is at least partly about grave-robbing. O’Connor plays Arthur, an Englishman who used to date a local Italian girl who has gone missing, and who is now presumed dead by everybody apart from her mother (Isabella Rossellini), who still gets offended when anybody speaks about her absent daughter in the past tense. While staying with her, Arthur falls in with a group of “tomboroli” (essentially "tomb raiders"), and as you might expect, they’re a scruffy and opportunistic band of chancers, hoping to find something really valuable one day, but in the meantime content to illicitly sell off minor Etruscan antiquities filched from half-forgotten mausoleums.
There’s something about the specific choice of Etruscan artefacts that gels beautifully with Rohrwacher’s formal ambitions for the film. Etruscan artefacts lurk in the country’s bones, pre-dating the Roman Empire, unobtrusive but deeply felt. Similarly, Hélène Louvart’s camera is often barely-there, and the sense that you are watching a film sometimes disappears completely, while the camera relaxes, inconspicuous and watchful, as we focus on the characters... but then, there's a shift, and the camera and editing insists upon itself, rotating a heady 180 degrees or speeding up to Keystone Cops tempo, or switching to a CCTV perspective, or having an actor break the fourth wall and directly address the audience down the lens.
This alternating approach to the camerawork never quite tips over into whimsy, carefully matching the central performance, which is characterful without being mannered, tough enough to carry us into a final act that both does and doesn’t draw all its narrative threads together. The effect is of a modern fable overlaid on top of a myth, with storytelling elements including looting a treasure, following a piece of twine, and getting trapped underground having a distinctly classical air to them, excavated and made singular and contemporary by Rorhwacher’s keen eye for both half-hidden detail and the overall form of her story.
LA CHIMERA (2023) Written by Alice Rohrwacher | Shot by Hélène Louvart | Edited by Nelly Quettier
Playing in Competition at the 76th Cannes Film festival
