I had two very good reasons to definitely want to see ‘La Chimera‘ (2023). The first – this is the first feature film of the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher after the unusual and superb ‘Lazzaro felice’ (2018). The second – we have the opportunity to see Isabella Rossellini again in a fairly consistent role, an actress whom I love enormously and whom we have the opportunity to see far too rarely in recent years. Two promises, therefore, that raised the risk that expectations would be too high relative to the viewing experience. Fortunately, that was not the case. Even if it doesn’t reach the magic of the director’s previous film, ‘La Chimera‘ is an interesting movie and one far from stereotypes, which transports us in its world and which accompanies us long after the viewing is over. Isabella Rossellini creates the role of an old lady with the professionalism and nobility that characterizes her, but also with the shadow of mystery that fascinated me in films like ‘Blue Velvet’. I was not disappointed.
The story in ‘La chimera‘ can be resumed like an action movie with tomb raiders. Arthur, the main hero, is an English archaeologist who travels to Italy to explore Etruscan tombs. The young man has a special talent for detecting where to dig to reveal treasures buried for millennia. Arthur carries in his soul the pain of the death of his lover, the daughter of a music teacher who lives in a ruined palace, assisted by a woman named Italia, to whom she gives singing lessons as payment. Demoralized and fresh out of prison, Arthur associates with a group of vagabonds who discover and illegally open and rob Etruscan tombs in order sell the finds to an antiquities dealer who then resells them for fabulous sums to the world’s rich. The police are constantly on their trail, without excess of zeal or efficiency.
If we refer to the tomb raiders action movies genre, ‘La Chimera‘ is an anti-Indiana Jones movie. What could be the story of an action movie mixed with a little melodrama and a little comedy is actually something else entirely. Not because the story doesn’t matter, but because the way it is told and the characters that populate it are much more interesting. The film is imbued with the melancholy of the main character, played by the British actor Josh O’Connor (a discovery for me), who sees the world as a dream in which the woman he loved is always nearby, but he cannot ever reach her. The meeting with Italia (played by the excellent Carol Duarte – another discovery), a single mother who works to raise two children, represents a hope for recovery – both emotional and maybe moral, but according to her criteria. Trying to make him forget his lost love and turn him away from the path of crime has little chance of success. Viewing Isabella Rossellini is always a delight for me, and so it was here. Alice Rohrwacher is one of the most talented and daring directors of a generation (I should say ‘one of the many generations’) of exceptional Italian film directors. She knows how to take a story that could be told in many other ways and turn it into a film that bears her personal stamp, combining the traditions of neo-realism with Fellini’s passion for popular culture and adding a dose of the fantastic brand Rohrwacher. When shooting decaying palaces, the streets or the popular dancing balls, the director seems to feel most in her element. She tells the story and plays with her tools, changes camera types and screen formats, and she does all these with an ease that constantly serves the narrative, so that at no point do we feel the cinematography is contrived or pretentious. Even if ‘La chimera‘ stops a little lower than the formidable ‘Lazzaro felice’, it is a very good film that reinforces my belief that Italian cinema is in one of its glorious periods.