Programme Notes: La Chimera

Throughout the history of cinema, filmmakers have used the medium to play with perceptions of time, space, and reality – compared to its predecessors in photography (still) and theatre (live), film can present stories that challenge the ordinary, linear, and real with its carefully arranged moving images. 

Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera plays with perceptions of all three. This story of an English grave robber in Italy with a strange ability to dowse for Etruscan artefacts in subterranean tombs is set in the 1980s, though it feels further removed from today – Arthur (Josh O’Connor) and his companions are occupied with relics from three millennia ago, and the rural landscape is dotted with villages unchanged for centuries. Likewise, the ground underneath is far from inert, holding treasures that the ragtag crew secret away to a middleman before wealthy collectors bid on the items. 

Furthermore, circumstances of Arthur’s personal and professional past are only occasionally hinted at, often in conflicting reports. As the film opens, he has just left a stint in jail for a crime never explained. He also continually sees Beniamina (Yile Vianello) in his mind – a beloved lost, perhaps forever. A robbery gone wrong and an untimely death seem the most likely explanations. His return to his former mates feels more bitter than joyous. Rohrwacher leaves much up for interpretation; it does not matter if Arthur’s dowsing is scientific or metaphysical, or what led him to Italy and got him in and out of jail. What matters is that, now, he must find a way to go on.

Echoing cinema’s metamorphosing possibilities is the universal yet deeply, strangely singular ordeal of grief. Despite the fact that every person on earth will experience great love and great loss, it is hard to articulate its terrifying power to stop time in its tracks, bending perceptions of the past and making a future unimaginable. Arthur is no exception in this agonising isolation.

Rohrwacher is no stranger to fantastical takes on the passage of time, communal ownership or lack thereof, and sympathetic if unflinching examinations of human rapacity. Her previous film, Happy As Lazzaro (2018), could have been a cautionary tale of misplaced trust and betrayed goodness in other hands, but instead becomes a quasi-mystical take on a young, trusting sharecropper caught up in a bored nobleman’s schemes, protected by nature when he is betrayed by his fellow humans. Lazzaro, however, is far less tortured than Arthur, giving his tragedy a crueller sheen. Arthur, a stranger in a strange land, finds trouble almost a relief. 

From an early appearance in The Riot Club (Dir. Lone Scherfig, 2014), his breakout role in God’s Own Country (Dir. Francis Lee, 2017), and an unforgettable supporting turn in Emma (Dir. Autumn de Wilde, 2020), O’Connor has proved himself an actor unafraid to find characters who look terrible and behave worse. Arthur is a hard man to love; he does not smile for the film’s first half hour, and when he finally, barely does so it seems against his will and better judgement. It is as if his experiences have led him to see his humanity as weakness and the same rumpled linen suit as his armour. After the loss of Beniamina and his time incarcerated he has cut himself off from former friends with a quiet seething fury, and his reunification with them can be read as a begrudging return to (genuine, or necessary) friendships. The only company he willingly seeks is Flora (Isabella Rossellini), Beniamina’s mother whose cheerful conviction her daughter will return visibly upsets her other children. 

With La Chimera and Challengers (Dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2024) both released in UK cinemas within weeks of each other this spring, filmgoers can see O’Connor’s range, intensity, and magnetism on display in two very different pictures. Arthur has none of Patrick’s cocky ease, yet there is something genuine and human under his surly stares and chain-smoking that draws in Italia (Carol Duarte), Flora’s hopelessly tone-deaf singing student with her own secrets. Italia is key: she is the only one who did not know Arthur before, and their unforced exploration of the other’s self and story defies conventional expectations of a romance.

The tragedy, or tragedies, at the heart of La Chimera does not negate moments of levity – look out for the places where the frame rate speeds up and aspect ratio changes to a boxier 4:3. These touches make it seem as if it is no longer Hélène Louvart’s expert cinematographic eye in charge but instead Arthur and his companions whimsically capturing their own exploits on cheap cameras, building shrines to their own bravado. And while Arthur may be drawn to the past for its memory, others – including Italia – see possibility and new lives, creating communal living spaces in run-down yet still beautiful abandoned mansions.

In many ways, La Chimera goes back even further than the Etruscans, becoming a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Orpheus, blessed by the gods with the gift of music and having lost his beloved Eurydice (in some versions, killed by a snake on their wedding day) journeys to Hades’ realm to plead for her life with his song – only to lose her again when he cannot obey the god’s stipulation that he cannot look back at her on their long walk back to the land of the living. Arthur continually returns to his own underworld (buried treasure, a lost civilisation’s history) with his heartbreak ever-present and lost lover around the corner, under the surface, up in the unreachable sunlight. Just as grief causes time and space to collapse, so does love. Arthur, and indeed all of us, cannot help but look backwards at what we love – be it a timeless artefact unseen for aeons or a glimpse of a lover’s face. We know that this turn and stolen glance will cause destruction and a second loss, but if we did not, our love would remain unproven. That is impossible to live with.

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