Halfway through making La Chimera, its star Josh O’Connor took a break and went off to make Challengers for Luca Guadagnino, then came back to Italy to finish off for Alice Rohrwacher. Since his breakthrough in 2017’s God’s Own Country, after five or so years of plugging away, these days everyone wants a piece of O’Connor.
They’re not remotely similar roles – a tennis player in Challengers, a graverobber in La Chimera – but from the actor’s point of view they have something in common. Both are essentially unlikeable people the audience needs to feel something for, and does, because O’Connor, as he also demonstrated in God’s Own Country and then Only You (not to mention his Prince Charles in The Crown), has a knack of withholding a touch when he acts, which forces the viewer out to meet him somewhere on neutral turf. And, once there, a connection is made.
That said, O’Connor’s character here, Arthur, an Englishman in Italy with a gift for finding Etruscan graves, isn’t just ethically dubious – he’s plundering a country’s bequest, after all – he’s also personally an unsavoury character, quietly peevish, quick to anger, dressed throughout in a cream suit that becomes increasingly filthy. He’s accused in the opening scene of being smelly and he probably does.
Rohrwacher lets the character embed before revealing what it is he actually does. Until that point all we know is that Arthur is in the region that was once ruled by the Etruscans before the Romans came along. That he has a fierce protectress in the shape of the matriarchal Signora Flora (Isabella Rossellini), mother of Arthur’s disappeared girlfriend, Beniamina. And that Flora’s many daughters and granddaughters consider Arthur to be a freeloader.
All is finally revealed when Rohrwacher brings Arthur’s gang into the picture, graverobbers who are hoping he is now back on the scene after a stint in jail and that he’ll take control of the operation again. Which he does, reluctantly, picking up the dousing switch he wields like a wand and going back to work once he realises that he has no other means of making money.
Rohrwacher studied Greek and Latin at university and comes from this “Etrurian” part of Italy. She gives us plenty of opportunity to see fabulous objects as her camera enters mock-ups of old tombs undisturbed for two thousand years. We learn little about Arthur and even when he starts in on a tentative relationship with Italia (Carol Duarte), Flora’s student/servant, we still don’t get much more than the surface.
This isn’t a character-driven piece, though it’s full of great characters, quite a few of them non-professional actors hired because they look right. Instead it’s more a ripping yarn, a good story well told, with a bit of history, some comedy, a little romance, a touch of the fantastical (finding graves with a forked twig is pretty weird) even some excitement when a rival gang starts muscling in on the scene.
Rohrwacher doesn’t just know her ancient history, she knows her Italian film-makers and pays homage to them in much the same way she did in The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro, the first two films of this trilogy.
Which is to say – realism punctured by breakouts. Suddenly the film speeds up. Suddenly it shifts into Fellini-esque carnivalesque. Suddenly the film stock has changed. The format has changed. The image has flipped or stretched. Sudden nods to De Sica and Pasolini, while Visconti seems to be part of the mix in the scenes set in Signora Flora’s crumbling palazzo.
It’s all done in a joyous freewheeling way, as if Rohrwacher is having fun rather than earnestly trying to shoehorn booklearning-style gravitas into her film. If you insist on depth then the whole thing can be read as a metaphor for Europe – the semi-detached Englishman, the ancient riches being looted for a fast buck, the sense of living on past glories, things falling slowly apart.
But it’s entirely enjoyable taken at face value. Maybe Arthur is actually the British King Arthur of legend, or maybe not. Where did his girlfriend Beniamina go, and does anyone care? Is the fact that his current girlfriend is called Italia significant, or a tease? Rohrwacher’s world-building is so exquisite and, ironically, so in the moment, that none of these and other unresolved issues matter much at all.
La Chimera – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
