LA CHIMERA
With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and
magical realism, filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher conjures a
marvelous entertainment set in a rural Italy eternally caught between the
ancient and the modern. Josh O’Connor (The Crown) stars
as Arthur, a ne’er-do well Englishman, handsomely rumpled and recently out of
prison, who returns to a rural town in central Italy where he hesitantly
reconnects with a ragtag group of tombaroli (tomb raiders), for whom he uses
his uncanny powers of divination to locate graves that date back to the
Etruscan period and teem with antiquities of immense value to collectors and
museums. Yet the melancholy Arthur has other ghosts on his mind, including his
long-lost love Beniamina, who haunts his memory like her own ghostly
civilization. Featuring gorgeous rough-hewn textures from the great
cinematographer Hélène Louvart and outstanding performances
from Isabella Rossellini, Carol Duarte, and Alba
Rohrwacher, La Chimera is a dreamlike descent into
a majestically tattered world right beneath our own. (Italy, 2023, 133 min.,
Italian with English Subtitles | Dir. Alice Rohrwacher)
