La Chimera review – shows new ways a movie can be

Awoman is miss­ing. Arthur (Josh O’Connor) imag­ines her, he sees her in his dreams, but deep down he knows that Beni­ami­na (Yile Vianel­lo) is gone, even if he can’t admit it to him­self. Or to her moth­er, Flo­ra (Isabel­la Rosselli­ni), who he returns to after a short stint in prison. He can’t quite adjust to the out­side world, and not just because Ital­ian isn’t his first lan­guage and some locals gig­gle at this strange Englishman.

There is some­thing desta­bil­is­ing, too, about Alice Rohrwacher’s style, which she has expand­ed for La Chimera, her fourth fea­ture, into some­thing almost lin­ear, with all sorts of visu­al ideas – from exag­ger­at­ed block­ing, to jump cuts, to sped up footage – that are sel­dom used more than once. And only after eight­ies-sound­ing synths appear on the sound­track, about an hour in, do you notice that the film’s set­ting is ambigu­ous: it could be the mod­ern day or a few decades ear­li­er, or, in a deep­er sense, it could be much, much older.

His­to­ry is close to the sur­face in Cen­tral Italy, as it seems like every­one is liv­ing with­in the accu­mu­lat­ed wreck­age of thou­sands of years. But the tem­po­ral divide is made stark when Arthur, falling back in with his Felliniesque gang of grave rob­bers, digs into the ancient Etr­uscan tombs scat­tered every­where. In the cold silence of this long dead world there is breath­less ten­sion, and it feels like they might nev­er be able to return to their own world.

But Arthur has a stronger sense for this archa­ic world. He has an extrasen­so­ry abil­i­ty to dowse for tombs, and when­ev­er he stands atop one, the cam­era – at first slow­ly, then in sharp flash­es – turns upside down, or maybe, for him, the right way up. He is like an Orpheus who can only look back, always too ter­ri­fied to face the world in front of him and what has left it.

Though the cam­era often fol­lows Arthur’s per­spec­tive, it isn’t neat­ly tied to it. Just as it doesn’t make a pre­cise dis­tinc­tion between images shot on 16mm, Super16 and 35mm; one isn’t used only for dreams, even if it’s most asso­ci­at­ed with them. Rohrwach­er instead makes con­nec­tions through some­thing more pri­mal than log­ic, a flow of images that feels sur­pris­ing but always intu­itive, in the way a dream does.

This doesn’t make La Chimera dis­tant or elu­sive, quite the oppo­site. It invites us into its labyrinthine struc­ture and form, it allows us space to explore. Rohrwach­er implic­it­ly makes the case against coher­ence: much of life exists beyond our under­stand­ing and so, to express it except through abstrac­tion and sug­ges­tion, is to flat­ten and obscure the depths of beau­ty and truth in the snatch­es of a con­ver­sa­tion half-heard in a Robert Alt­man film, or a lan­guage only par­tial­ly under­stood. Because, to quote anoth­er artist whose work feels far old­er than their time, ​“There are cracks in every­thing, that’s how the light gets in”.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, week­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.