What do we stand to lose when we exchange the immaterial value of a work of art for a trifling version of it? La Chimera, the newest film from Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher and my favorite of 2024, may not offer an answer to that question so much as it raises it.
La Chimera tells the story of a group of tombaroli—tomb raiders—who scour Tuscany, breaking into ancient Etruscan tombs in search of priceless artifacts to sell to the enigmatic fence, Spartaco. Arthur, an Englishman and a former (possibly failed) archaeologist, played by Josh O’Connor, is the troupe’s de facto leader. Yet, he seems motivated less by financial gain and more by a yearning to reunite with his lost love, Beniamina, whom he has been searching for since his release from prison, where he served time after being apprehended by the authorities.
Throughout the film, Arthur’s appearance becomes increasingly disheveled; his hair and beard grow more scraggly, and his lone suit, which at one point I imagine represented his academic ambition, grows filthier with each excursion as his preoccupation with the material diminishes and his investment in the transcendent grows.
The sad, opportunistic tombaroli follow Arthur through fields, over mountainous switchbacks, and along the seaside, as he stumbles onward, often in the dark, led by his trusty dowsing rod, which, as one writer puts it, serves as a “thread somehow connecting his hand to hers.” This writer’s use of the word “thread” is apt, as in multiple dream-state sequences throughout the film, we see Beniamina ambling through the countryside, her knit sweater having snagged on something in the dirt behind her, symbolically leaving a trail that extends from her to the land of the living. It is this thread that Arthur longs to find and believes will lead him to Beniamina’s side. While Arthur’s fellow tombaroli blast through tombs like a bull in a china shop, grubbing about for the most valuable-looking pieces, Arthur tends to stand near the entrance, almost entranced, seemingly taking honest inventory of the space’s contents—not to estimate the monetary value but to find a gateway, that slight little thread that will lead him to Beniamina.
This is the posture Rohrwacher hopes we will have when we approach her work. She wants us puzzled, scratching our heads, fumbling around in search of any shred of evidence that the past is alive and that its fingers interlock with the future. She isn’t interested in viewers knowing exactly what to make of her films because films are artifacts that speak for themselves, not only about the present but also about the past and the future. Just like one would take up residence in a space that has been previously occupied and will be occupied by someone else in the future, we have an opportunity to take up residence in a film and interact with the past, present, and future as generations cycle through the fixed marker that is the work (Hannah Strong, Little White Lies).
In an interview with The Guardian, Rohrwacher says, “You struggled with my film? Fantastic!” When we approach creative work, Rohrwacher believes, “We don’t need to… break down every door, storm in like conquistadors. We can gently knock. We can walk around it in circles.”
It would be as natural as breathing to try and describe the movie with a list of reductive superlatives—La Chimera may be the strangest, most fantastic, most beguiling, most endearingly elusive movie I’ve ever seen—and all of these things would be true. But this would not be director Alice Rohrwacher’s preferred reaction to her film. Rohrwacher seems to chafe against audiences’ attempts to “estimate the inestimable,” to borrow Spartaco’s turn of phrase. When we trifle with the sacred by attempting to impress upon it our arbitrary standards of valuation, we lose the opportunity to be part of an ongoing conversation. How might the work be in conversation with the past, the present, and the future, and what might it be saying to us, if only we allowed it to speak to us on its own terms? Where might an honest interaction with a film, book, painting, or music record take us? Paul Schrader, in his book, Transcendental Style in Film, believes the work could take us to the very threshold of the Divine, a sentiment Josh O’Connor’s Arthur seems inclined to share.
