La chimera
"La chimera" follows Arthur (Josh O'Connor), a young British archaeologist, who we meet as he heads back home to Tuscany after spending some time in prison. His good looks attract stares and giggles from young ladies, but he is unattractively morose and unkempt, dressed in a white linen suit that humorously gets more wrinkled and dirty as the movie progresses. Having no other prospects for work, he reluctantly reunites with his goofy crew of grave robbers, who illegally sell Etruscan artifacts to a fence named Spartaco. Arthur has an unexplained, possibly supernatural ability to go into a sort of trance and locate spots where ancient tombs are buried, and the rest of his crew happily follows him around hoping for the next big score that could make them all rich.
Arthur also spends time checking in with Flora (the always wonderful Isabella Rossellini), an aging matriarch of several highly opinionated daughters, including Arthur's beloved Beniamina. Flora speaks as if Beniamina will be home any minute, but everyone else understands that Beniamina is dead. Flora is helped about the home by Italia (Carol Duarte), a singing student that is secretly living in the house with her two children. Arthur and Italia have some chemistry, but it doesn't seem like Arthur is capable of turning it into any kind of real relationship.
The archeological elements therefore serve as a way to explore Arthur's inability to escape the past; he longs to be with Beniamina again, and often dreams of finding her in various cavernous tombs. These dreams seem to spur him on to continue divining and unearthing graves, as if he could somehow find her somewhere underground if he just keeps looking. Arthur's visions and magical abilities provide the movie with a moody, dreamlike atmosphere, but its frustrating that we end up learning literally nothing else about Arthur, who barely speaks and floats around in a grumpy daze. This lack of characterization makes his entire arc feel more like nothing more than an intellectual exercise, and the eventual end result of his search for Beniamina (and the movie's final scene) falls flat emotionally because of it.
Perhaps more effective (possibly because it isn't tied to any one character) is the movie's criticism of our lust for material things and the desire to exchange them for profit. Arthur and his crew are not only illegally digging up items that belong to the state, but they often lie and cheat people in order to take things from other people's property. No items or artifacts are sacred to these tomb raiders; when Italia objects that these buried items were precious to the dead and should remain where they are, she is ruthlessly mocked by the grave robbers, who feel entitled to anything they can dig up. Anything and everything can be bought or sold for the right price, and the buyers and sellers are just as complicit, as illustrated in a comically surreal sequence where the robbers and the fence Spartaco growl at each other like dogs. Even Flora's daughters can't stop themselves from quietly divvying up Flora's possessions before she's even gone, her things clearly worth more to her family than Flora herself.
Arthur is so absorbed in his quest to live in the past that he sadly misses out on what could be a promising new future. Italia is poor, but seems to be fulfilled and happy to be with her young family. The tragedy is that Arthur realizes he could be a part of this happy life, but can't stop himself from repeatedly going back underground, trapped in his communion with the dead.
These are all worthwhile themes to explore, and the framework of the story is perfectly situated to do so, but the movie leaves the viewer with a lot of work to do to get anything out of it. Normally that's more a criticism of the viewer instead of the filmmaker, but here it feels like Rohrwacher could've engaged the audience a bit more, maybe appealing more to our hearts instead of our heads. As it stands, it's a fascinating trove of ideas that can be difficult to watch at times, making it hard to recommend to those who aren't prepared to put in the effort.
