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Orpheus and Eurydice meet Theseus and Ariadne in Rohrwacher’s latest masterwork.

A review by Panagiota Stoltidou

First shown at the 76th edition of the Cannes film festival this past May, Alice Rohrwacher’s newest fable follows the hilarious misadventures of a band of homeless tomb raiders in 1980s Tuscany. Led by Arthur (Josh O’ Connor), an English archaeologist-turned-criminal with a surgically precise talent for locating Etruscan tombs with a dowsing rod, the curious gang plunders graves under cover of darkness, and then sells its finds to Spartaco, a dubious antiquities dealer. It’s shady, dangerous stuff, yet Rohrwacher’s hand assuredly lets it slip into comical territory, treating the troubadours with sisterly love and irony. Following The Wonders (2014) and Happy as Lazzaro (2018), La Chimera is the final installment of an untitled trilogy about the director and screenwriter’s home country. The soundtrack and Hélèn Louvart’s cinematography wonderfully play off each other to locate the action in Italy.

As is also the case in Rohrwacher’s previous work, the fantastical repeatedly ruptures the fabric of the real across the film’s narrative plane. In one scene Arthur, tucked rather uncomfortably at the backseat of a loud car, dozes in and out of tormented sleep. A red thread is swaying outside the car window in front of him, luring him out of his daze. Yet it vanishes before he can sit up to catch it. This gesture is repeated across a number of eerie sequences: a red thread plants itself into Arthur’s field of vision, disrupts the pulse of his reality, and disappears in a flash. Weaving this teasing thread for him is Beniamina (Yile Vianello): sunburnt, smiling, elusive. Her freckled skin and blonde curls are molded from the cast of another life, a life under the sun that Arthur once shared with her and whose sad details we are only allowed to glimpse fragmentarily as the film progresses.

Ultimately, this is a comedy with a heartbreaking core. The subtle ticks and movements of the buried antiquities’ private life lull Arthur into an obsessive state of excavation that not even Italia (Carol Duarte), his new friend and faithful confidante, can rescue him from. As the ciphers of Italy’s glorious past and Arthur’s own converge in the damp silence of the cave, we catch a flash of red thread. Could this be a way out, or will it only lead Arthur further down under?

Brimming with life and carnivalesque panache, La Chimera carries us into a frenzied subterranean adventure, unveiling treasures that are tantalizingly close and yet always shape-shifting, always out of reach. It’s a tender, moving film.