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LA CHIMERA
"The film's got more than a hint of Fellini in it; a carnivalesque rogues galleria of faces"
LA CHIMERA (ITALY) (2023) Drama / Adventure / Comedy / Fantasy / Romance
Director : Alice Rohrwacher
Starring : Josh O'Connor
Isabella Rossellini
Vincenzo Nemolato
2 hr 10 min
Josh O’Connor plays Arthur, an Englishman in an increasingly filthy cream linen suit, living in backwater Tuscany in the 1980s. Like a reverse Indiana Jones, he is an archaeologist gone bad: he has the paranormal power to find Etruscan tombs by using a dowser, collapsing on the leaves that cover them from the effort. His abilities place him at the centre of a band of Italian tombaroli, or tomb raiders, who dig up these long-buried treasures and sell them to a shady dealer, Spartaco.
Rohrwacher’s Eighties Italy is stagnant and eroding. There is an element, too, of spiritual decay: the dead, left in peace for thousands of years, are met by a new generation unrestrained by conventional morality. In this sense, La Chimera nods to the realist postwar films of Roberto Rossellini (father of Isabella). But it is also surrealist and Fellini-esque, influenced by myth and fairy tale. One of its most striking visual refrains is a red thread that trails from the bottom of Beniamina’s dress, its end disappearing into the ground. Is it the red thread of Chinese mythology, invisibly bound around the fingers of two lovers destined to meet? Or Ariadne’s thread, given in Greek myth to Theseus to help him escape the Minotaur’s labyrinth? Perhaps Arthur and Beniamina are Orpheus and Eurydice, she condemned to the underworld, he to writing songs of mourning. Arthur uses his divining powers to seek out the dead, but it is Beniamina he is really searching for.
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