Review of Aliche Rohrwacher’s film “Chimera”

From January 1, Aliche Rohrwacher’s romantic drama Chimera, which premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, will also be released, pre-divided among potential Russian blockbusters. He talks about the tender film, which inherits the best Italian film traditions. Julia Shagelman.

“Chimera” is the final part of a conventional film trilogy, which also includes Rohrwacher’s previous films: “Miracles” (2014) and “Lazarus” (2018), both awarded Cannes prizes – the Grand Prix of the Jury and the award for best screenplay, respectively. The action of all three takes place in a dreamed-up, as if seen in a dream, fairy-tale Italy, carefully hiding (or deliberately hidden) from the temptations and dangers of modernity. In “Miracles,” a conservative beekeeper created a patriarchal closed world on his farm; in “Lazar,” the marquise, the owner of a tobacco plantation, supported the illusion among the inhabitants of a lost village that they were her sharecroppers, as if it were the 19th century, and not the last decade of the 20th century . And it’s not as if discovering the truth would make these peasants any happier.

In Chimera, time also stops forever somewhere in the 1980s, looking even more archaic on screen due to the fact that Rohrwacher’s regular cinematographer Helene Louvart shoots them on grainy, as if slightly blown-out 35mm film. But the characters in the film do not just live in a different era – they exist in a fantasy world, at the junction between our reality and the other world, between reality and sleep, which is emphasized by the change from 35mm to 16mm format, blurred frames, and erased boundaries. It is not for nothing that we first meet the main character, the Englishman Arthur (Josh O’Connor), sleeping in a train carriage – in a dream he sees his beloved Benjamin (Ile Yara Vianello), but the ticket inspector wakes him up, and he cannot watch the dream to the end. and the beloved slips away.

Arthur is handsome enough that his compartment neighbors would willingly flirt with him, he is dressed in a white, although not very clean, suit (he will become dirtier as the film progresses), and he speaks good Italian. But, as the merchant of all sorts of small goods will not fail to notice on the same train, he stinks – like a man who has just been released from prison. And he really just got out of prison, where he ended up for illegal excavations of ancient Etruscan burial grounds. Arthur gives his venerable profession of archaeologist and gift for discovering hidden underground treasures for almost free use to a noisy motley group of black tombaroli diggers, similar to characters from either Pinocchio or Commedia dell’Arte.

They sell the found antiquities to a certain mysterious Spartaco, who hides his operations behind the facade of a veterinary clinic (but the Tombaroli speak of him with such reverence, as if he were at least a Bond villain). They don’t see anything bad in their activities – a poor person needs to earn money somehow, and the Etruscans died a long time ago, so all these vases and figurines are completely useless to them. These resilient losers are united by a common desire to get rich in one fell swoop and never have to work again. But Arthur is not interested in money: he lives in a temporary hut attached to an ancient fortress wall, dresses alternately in two dirty suits, and buys nothing but cigarettes. For him, the Etruscan treasures are only a by-product of his search, but in reality he is looking for an entrance to the afterlife, where Benjamina has gone forever – at the same time Eurydice and Ariadne, beckoning him in his dreams with a thread from the unraveling hem of a red knitted dress.

Chasing this chimera, Arthur almost misses the interest that a living and quite tangible woman shows in him, ironically called Italy (Carol Duarte). He meets her when he visits another artifact of the past – the decaying estate of Benjamina’s mother, Flora (Isabella Rossellini), from whom Italy supposedly studies opera singing, but in fact works as a servant for everything, hiding two young children from her employer. Although the young woman is horrified to learn of the tomb robberies, she is close to the Tombaroli in that she has dreams and a strong attachment to real, earthly life. Arthur and Flora have long existed in our world only formally, but in fact they belong to the kingdom of ghosts.

Alice Rohrwacher herself manages to successfully balance on the brink of past and present, at the same time drawing from the bottomless treasury of Italian cinema (when watching the film, one remembers both neorealism and comedies about policemen and thieves of the times when they were still funny) and creating her own, neither what a different magical world. And the first timid days of the new year are perhaps the best time to immerse yourself in it and feel the fragile connection of times.