Arthur is tall, young English man who wears a uniform of crumpled cream suit. He has the gift of divining where rich Etruscans were buried along with precious possessions that can be dug up and sold on the Italian black market. This archaeologist-cum-graverobber is also gifted with an air of arrogance and a heavy heart that is grieving for his dead girlfriend Beniamina.
In La Chimera, director Alice Rohrwacher (Happy As Lazzaro) paints 1980s Tuscany as quaint and somewhat ramshackle. Arthur – played by a sombre and often irritable Josh O’Connor – lives in a rough shack in the side of a hill. His girlfriend’s mother, Flora (Isabella Rossellini), lives in a leaking residence that was once grand, almost a mausoleum for the living, fussed over and bullied by a gaggle of daughters.
Cross-dressing at a tractor festival becomes a visual metaphor for the tomb raiders operating in plain sight even while everyone in the small town knows how the gang make a living. Arthur takes a shine to Flora’s live in slave Italia (Carol Duarte) – ostensibly working as a maid in return for impractical singing lessons – who is hiding a couple of secrets of her own.
The audience watch as the gang go about their work without much sense of haste. The great magician keeps finding new places to dig, all the while troubled by memories of the absent Beniamina. A third act discovery finally precipitates the crisis that can draw the drama to an end.
That the team plundering the ancient graves should cram into such a small getaway car – their rivals also use an undersized vehicle – creates a sense of surrealism. A couple of musical interludes are used to ask whether the graverobbers are heroic outlaws who deserve cultural posterity. The film
switches between at least three aspect ratios to signal whether a scene features Arthur day dreaming (1.33:1), the characters are going about their normal business (1.66:1), or the gang are dealing with Etruscan treasure (the widest 1.85:1) It’s subtle but effective. Watch out for the rounded corners of the framing, and the almost comical speeded up scenes of the police in pursuit of the gang.
Rohrwacher combines lots of unexpected elements to boost a somewhat sedate story into an imaginative playground. You may hover on the fence wondering whether Arthur deserves some comeuppance for his misdeeds, but you’ll be firmly rooting for Italia as she scrapes around the make ends meet while the gang dig up their pay packets from the ground.
La Chimera is being screened at Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 10 May.
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