LA CHIMERA
Alice Rohrwacher's Orpheus in the Tuscan underworld
Directed by Alice Rohrwacher
Starring Josh O'Connor, Carol Duarte, Vincenzo Nemolato, Isabella Rossellini
Opens 10 May 2025
Cert 15
9/10
In her lyrical reverence for Italian country life, her abiding sense of political injustice, her ludic theatricality and her grounding in the rich soil of fairy tale, fable and myth, Italian director Alice Rohrwacher might be an heir of Italo Calvino. Her last film, 2018’s Happy As Lazzaro, was a version of Lazarus, or Rip Van Winkel, transformed for a world of Italian sharecroppers adjusting to neoliberalism. Now she returns with her version of Orpheus amid 1980s Tuscan graverobbers.
Arthur (Josh O’Connor, familiar as the nerdy, needy young Prince Charles from The Crown), is a shambling, dreamy British archaeologist, fresh out of jail after being locked up for looting tombs. Thanks to his gift for dowsing sites of buried treasure armed only with a hazel wand, he’s come to lead a raggle taggle band of tombaroli, making a precarious living selling illicitly unearthed Etruscan artefacts to collectors.
But though his eye can be turned by a handsome pot, Arthur is really on the trail of his lost love, Beniamina, missing and quite possibly dead. Her grandmother - a regal Isabella Rossellini - offers him few clues, but introduces him to her new pupil Itália (Carol Duarte) a tone deaf music student and single mum. Their fledgling romance hits the rocks when Itália is introduced to the world of the tombaroli and is disgusted at their acts of cheerful desacration, prompting Arthur to his own sea change.
Shot once more by Rohrwacher’s right-hand woman Hélène Louvart, La Chimera is another magic spell of a movie, divining a light and a lightness of touch capable of conjuring the worlds of Hesiod, Ovid, Fellini, Verdi and Franco Battiato in a single frame. It’s the very lightness, in fact, that Calvino himself praised as a key virtue for our millennium: the nimble, unexpected leap out of all the capitalist petrifications of the modern world. Someday Rohrwacher should shoot The Baron in the Trees.
