Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera opens not with a bang, but with a tug. Arthur Harari’s protagonist, the lanky, disheveled Arthur (Josh O’Connor), is yanked back from the brink of the afterlife by a frayed piece of string. He lands on a mattress in a dusty train depot, and we realize we are watching a film about verticality: the pull of the underworld versus the weight of the sun.
The film’s secret weapon is its third act, which shifts the setting from the men’s tunnels to the women’s world. Here, we meet Italia (Carol Duarte), the pregnant, practical sister of Beniamina, and Flora (Isabella Rossellini), an imperious former opera singer who runs a ramshackle music school out of her crumbling villa. Where the men steal to possess, the women build to sustain. The final sequence, a breathtaking, vertiginous journey through a necropolis that connects the past to the present, is not a treasure hunt. It is a funeral procession. La Chimera Film
On its surface, La Chimera is a heist movie for antiquarians. Set in 1980s Tuscany, it follows a gang of eccentric tombaroli (tomb raiders) who use dowsing rods to locate lost Etruscan graves, plundering them for artifacts to sell on the black market. But Rohrwacher has no interest in the thrill of the score. She is interested in the hole left behind. Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera opens not with a