A fairy-tale comedy drama by Alice Rohrwacher about an archeologist hoping to be reunited with his lover. The lead is played by star of The Crown Josh O’Connor.
Italy in the 1980s. Arthur, a young British man, is having nightmares on a Tuscan train. Judging by his rather fluent Italian he is not here for the first time. This turns out to be the case. He is returning to the place where he was happy with Beniamina, who died some time ago. Arthur is always welcome at the dilapidated but still impressive palazzo of the former opera singer Madam Flora (the marvellous Isabella Rosselini). Arthur is a talented archaeologist, who has an incredible ability to find Estruscan burial sites containing artifacts that are of great value. Together with a group of old acquaintances he trades his finds on the black market, but his prematurely departed lover is never far from his mind.
Alice Rohrwacher (The Wonders, Lazzaro Felice) presented her new film at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where it was part of the main competition. For Rohrwacher, La Chimera is the final part in a trilogy, but for the viewer it is the quintessence of this main follower of cinematic magical realism’s favorite techniques. In La Chimera memories alternate with reality, the present becomes the past and vice versa, and various types of film stock unexpectedly replace each other. It is a film-dream that seems to be not entirely from the contemporary, digital world we are familiar with; cinema in which Rohrwacher chooses again and again to reference the grandiose heritage of the past—from Rilke’s poems about Orpheus and Eurydice to old tales of mysterious and reckless graverobbers.
The film will be shown in Italian and English with Russian subtitles.
La Chimera
Director Alice Rohrwacher
Italy, France, Switzerland, 2023, 130 min. 18+
