Arthur (Josh O’Connor) returns to Lazio, Italy after spending some time in jail for selling Etruscan artifacts on the black market.  He reunites with Flora (Isabella Rossellini), the mother of his deceased girlfriend, Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello), and is introduced to Italia (Carol Duarte), a young woman and aspirational singer who works for Flora in exchange for singing lessons.  Lonely and unhappy, it is not long until he is back at his old ways with his Tombaroli, a disheveled group of amateur grave robbers led by Pirro (Vincenzo Nemolato) in Arthur’s absence, but having been hollowed out from his lost love, he begins to see beyond the artifacts in the crypts and finds a new appreciation of the art and the souls that have been resting there for thousands of years. 

Alice Rohrwacher’s latest fable, La Chimera, was acquired by Neon after its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023.  Rohrwacher collaborated with Carmela Covino and Marco Pettenello on the script, and together they explore a multitude of themes across the film’s lyrical 130-minute runtime.  With dreamlike cinematography from Hélène Louvart and Nelly Quettier assembling the footage like stanzas of a poem, La Chimera is a film that is constantly in motion, but feels it occurs in the span of a breath; a last breath, perhaps, and a reflection on a life that did not end up that way it was imagined.  

Leading the film is O’Connor as Arthur, and while his brooding presence fills the role well, Arthur is less a character than he is a conduit for Rohrwacher’s themes to flow through.  Because of this creative choice in the writing phase, and because Arthur occupies almost every scene of the film, La Chimera is a real puzzle that requires audiences not to try and put the pieces together but rather to seek out the beauty of the colors and chaos of all the pieces laid out on the table before them.  He is accompanied by an enjoyable ensemble of the rural-minded Tombaroli who handle themselves somewhere at the intersection of the working class and noble families at the center of Rohrwacher’s preceding work, Happy as Lazzaro (2018), but the success of the film is riding solely on O’Connor’s shoulders. Again, credit must be due to O’Connor for being able to inhabit and breathe life into this motif so that we can stay engaged with the film across its beguiling form and structure while he also wrestles eyes and attention away from the more energetic and exuberant characters of this world.   

Delving into the themes, the first one presents itself more as a bit of irony than anything else; Arthur,  an archeologist, remains fixated on his lost love.  He is unable to move on from her, and further, unable or unwilling to forge new connections.  There are plenty of films where this dynamic would be unlocked at the end of the film, but Rohrwacher unveils this early on in the first twenty or so minutes so that she can then focus elsewhere.  What drives the main action of the film – and to use the word action here is generous – is the concept of ownership when the owner passes away, but notably, La Chimera is not looking to engage with the concept of legacy, or building towards a future generation, but instead investigates who is entitled to what when coming from a larger, shared history.   

Arthur and his team dig up these long-ago-buried objects to stock the black market auctions run by Spartaco (Alba Rohrwacher), but the state has established laws that any artifacts are the property of the state.  The Tombaroli are doing this, not to free the art or return it to the people, but to turn a quick buck while the wealthy bid to hoard the art away in their own private collections, presumably far from the banks of the Tyrrhenian Sea.  This is just a job to them, and it is possible to graft on additional insight towards the stripping away of ethics and morality that come with jobs in certain sectors – the workers may not agree with the work they do, but it is a necessary means for survival – but Rohrwacher is not focused entirely on decrying that specific aspect of gross capitalism.  She has ire towards Arthur, but a good deal of compassion, too.  Her fury is more reserved for Spartaco and the bidders, but it presents itself more as contempt.  It is not until Italia, having witnessed Arthur discover a grave and begin the exhumation that Rohrwacher is able to give her starkest rebuke towards his line of work and that the moral transgression of his deeds begin to cloud his mind and loom behind him like a specter of death itself.   

It is this same moonlit sequence a little past the halfway point that Rochwater employs one of the most tragic scenes in her emotionally brimming film.  As the modern air rushes into the newly discovered tomb, the color from the paintings begins to vanish.  Italia was right, this was not meant for human eyes, but for the spirits.  It is in the scene that we, along with Arthur, begin to feel that dread.  We are no longer wrapped up in the excitement of finding a stray pot or an amulet, we feel like we are trespassing. 

In the center of the room is a massive statue of a beautiful goddess who has surrounded herself with animals.  While Arthur pays his respects at this abandoned altar, Pirro quickly and cleanly beheads the goddess so they can remove her from the tomb. A rival Tombaroli forces Arthur and his crew to abandon the site where they take the statue and the other artifacts for themselves.  It does not matter that the statue is without a head, someone somewhere will still pay a handsome sum.  It does not matter that we never know who this statue was made to honor, who carved it, what prayers it listened to, it simply matters that someone can say they “own” it.  Tease this out, given the goddess’ clear connection to nature, it is the foley of man to think that they can own or have mastery over nature; over death. 

It is not just the deceased who find themselves being stripped of their belongings as Flora’s daughters are already grappling over how to divvy up the estate when she passes as she sits in her own living room witnessing the endless bickering.  Not everyone in La Chimera is a vulture, however.  Rohrwacher shows that, much like the circle of life in nature, there is a similar cycle that can occur as a society lives and evolves, growing and changing and leaving things behind.  This is explored through an abandoned station house that once belonged to someone and now belongs to no one, so now it is everyone’s. As such, Italia has decided, in a continuing and practical rebuke against Arthur’s modus operandi, has taken over this left-behind building and formed a commune where the destitute women of the town with nowhere else to go can come to live and raise their children. She seeks to build and grow instead of wallowing. 

The film plays out, ultimately, like a tragedy with its own chorus, albeit here a troubadour sings about Arthur and his exploits as if he were a folk hero in a fable, and in a way, he absolutely is though the moral of his story is not as precise as those credited to Aesop. Rohrwacher is not afraid to treat her characters as fools who falsely believe they have mastery over their own fate, and while La Chimera remains starkly agnostic, she invites audiences to watch this unfold from above so that we may learn from it. She is not necessarily cruel, but she does speed up the frame rate at times, like when they run from the cops or abound with glee upon discovering treasures which gives the sequence the feeling of an old vaudeville captured by a cameraman with an uneven hand. Despite this bit of play, the ending is powerful and beautiful, though it leaves us feeling cavernous. Arthur is far from a sympathetic character, despite his change of heart, so the catharsis we feel is not one of revelation connected to his arc or his growth as we tend to expect. Rather, it is a weight which we did not realize we were slowly bearing more and more of being lifted from our chests, and that first breath of fresh air, rushing into our lungs. Unlike Arthur, though, it is hopeful we are able to grow from that grief, lest we be swept away like murals long-since painted adorning the halls where the spirits reside as new air, new understanding, fills us. The shadow of grief may still be present, but with any luck we may learn from it and grow.