Rohrwacher’s La Chimera – a tapestry of human fragility

In La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher takes the viewer on a journey with a gang of tombaroli on an unnamed small Italian village’s streets, fields, and woods in the 1980s

La Chimera – a cultural irony-rich tale of memories, impossible dreams, and human fragility  

In La Chimera, Rohrwacher takes the viewer on a journey on an unnamed small Italian village’s streets, fields, and woods in the 1980s. There, we follow the return to the town of young British archaeologist Arthur (Josh O’Connor) and witness his involvement with a gang of tombaroli. These working-class local looters scavenge through the countryside to find and sell Etruscan artworks into the international network of stolen artifacts. 

The skill Arthur employs in his line of work on the shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea is not one he learned in Archaeology courses but rather his innate ability to sense the void, allowing him to locate the underground gaps where Etruscan tombs and the artifacts they contain lie hidden from contemporary humanity’s sight. 

A collective longing for what’s beyond reach 

With his uncanny ability to find invisible things and his undying devotion to a dead lover, Arthur, a man who seems as drawn to the world of the dead as he does to that of the living, becomes an embodiment of humanity’s attraction towards the impossible dreams and what’s lost to time. In Alba Rohrwacher’s sublimation of the Italian countryside of the 1980s, Josh O’Connor’s character is not the sole one to fall for the charm of the past, which molds the tangled lives depicted in La Chimera.      

In the film, the past and longing it kindles in humanity acts as an anchor for the elder singing teacher Flora (Isabella Rossellini), who hasn’t accepted the death of her daughter Beniamina (Yile Vianello), Arthur’s girlfriend, and as an ill-fated chance for social mobility for the tombaroli. Longing is the fil-rouge of the movie, starting from its title. The Italian noun la Chimera is used to refer not only to the hybrid beast from Greek mythology but also to elusive dreams and fantasies bound to leave people defeated and empty.  

Through Rohrwacher’s empathetic eye, the characters’ human fragility never comes off as the flaw of fools but as a representation of humanity’s complexities. A humanity that, much like Arthur himself, can be at times capable of wrath and tenderness, profoundness and obliviousness. 

Who owns beauty? Who owns history? Humanity, humanities, and the gaze  

The film poses a question about the ownership of art and beauty. The movie, set in the 1980s, captures this decade’s attitude to history, the humanities, heritage, and art. In an era of hedonism, drunk on the soon-dead dream of infinite economic growth, there was no space for human fragility. The beauty of times long gone had no sacredness left, and it was given no reverence. 

Never one to oversimplify, Rohrwacher showed us how the tombaroli are far from being the sole driven by this hunger for money, for the new, and the modern. Their disregard and ridicule for the past and the attitudes of the local humanity of that past don’t happen in a vacuum. They are part of a system, a clog in a lucrative machine: the illegal art trade. With uncalculated amounts of both antiquities and fine art being traded under the radar, this multi-million-dollar trade is the third-largest form of illicit trade on the planet, after weapons and narcotics. 

I tombaroli – A drop in the ocean

Illicit trade in cultural goods was considered then and now a “low risk—high profit” illegal trade compared to other illicit activities due to the ease with which the traded objects can be concealed, the legal loopholes, and the relative lack of punishment. 

This trade was a way out of poverty for working-class people chasing the chimera of social mobility, whose desire for a different life was exploited by brokers and buyers from the wealthier antiquities market countries. The institutions aren’t immune to this disregard for history and the humanities. After all, as the Cantastoria sings in La Chimera folk ballad «il tombarolo è una goccia nel mare» (the looter is a drop in the ocean). 

With a power station looming high over a beach and the Etrurian sanctuary hidden underneath it, beauty is at the mercy of the world’s amnesia. Italia, the aspiring singer played with tact and naturalness by Carol Duarte, is the sole character in this tapestry of disillusionment with an eye for the sacred and the invisible, a reverence for what was not «fatto per gli occhi degli uomini» (made for men to gaze at), but for the souls of the land’s past, those who saw and created for what’s beyond the material world.      

A Bildungsroman – the quest for morality and goddess 

La Chimera ‘s exploration of the relationship between these two worlds, the visible and invisible, brings us to the question posed by the director’s trilogy: what should we do with our past? In the film, this conundrum is personified by its protagonist, Arthur.      

Through Arthur, La Chimera investigates the plasticity of history, our views of the humanities, and the plasticity of the human soul. Perhaps the least sympathetic of the protagonists from the” trilogia della Tuscia (o del Centro Italia),” Arthur has a wealth of human fragility hidden beyond the egoism and blindness that belongs to both his time and humankind. While he tries to follow his moral compass, time and time again, he finds himself drawn back by his longing to search for that missing piece, an ethereal Orpheus. 

Arthur, lo straniero – language and belonging 

A man with no surname, past, or homeland, he moves in and out of the world of the forests and beaches of Tuscia, its decaying buildings, and folkloristic village traditions. Across the lands of the story, everyone knows of him. He never goes unnoticed. «L’inglese» (the Englishman), the giant, Beniamina’s lover, but it’s skin deep. He tells no tales of his life across the Alps and keeps no mementos of that life, but he is not tethered to the land of Etruria either. Like the shanty he lives in just outside the village, Arthur lives a precarious existence, never a part of the community but no stranger to it either. 

A drifter, an outsider, Arthur is charmed by the humanity of the unnamed village of the story, drawn southward by a missing sense of belonging, a sense of history. He speaks a language not his own and digs foreign soil, looking for his roots. Both Arthur and Mélodie (Lou Roy-Lecollinet), one of the other enigmatic foreigners in the world of La Chimera, retreat in the privacy and intimacy of their native tongues when speaking their truths, putting a barrier between them and the people of those rugged lands. In the polyglot La Chimera, language cements connections and builds walls, creating a tapestry of human complexity that the viewer can fully understand. 

A historical film – cultural irony in a celebration of history and film history 

As a historical movie centred around history, La Chimera is not afraid to borrow from the past and infuse the story with cultural irony. Instead of being shot digitally, the movie was shot on three types of film: 35 mm, super 16 mm, and 16mm; it uses the power of film as a narrative medium to the fullest. 

The film moves through the history of cinema with its variegated roster of cinematic references borrowed from the world of drama and comedy. With its bordering-on-slapstick comedic moments, and the cultural irony of its homages to Buster Keaton, Bud Spencer, and Terence Hill, the film finds humor in the tragedies of human fragility, escaping categories and definitions.  

Alice Rohrwacher

Alice Rohrwacher was born in 1982 in Fiesole. She studied in Turin and Lisbon. Her feature debut was Corpo celeste (2011).