The heart of it, in the end, might seem quite common place. A criminal recently let out of jail goes back to his old neighborhood planning for one big score that will set him and his pals up for life. But everything about “La Chimera,” from its title on down, takes an oblique and meandering approach. Along the way are oddball characters and lazy talkers, snatches of overheard songs or parades passing by bits of dialogue shared between people who aren’t even in the same place.
Exactly the same as last year’s charming “Happy as Lazzaro,” Rohrwacher deceives you into believing her movie is a pleasingly low key hang. The truth is she’s saying something deeper and more profound about history centuries of culture and a newly lost love.
Josh O’Connor’s Arthur is the hangdog thief on whom both these forces pull equally. He’s an Englishman in rural Italy with an uncanny knack for sniffing out Etruscan artefacts that have been buried with the dead, he follows his instincts in a trance like state. The ragtag band of tombaroli who trail after him, full of expectation, add to the film’s atmosphere of bubbling, playful chaos.
But Arthur is also haunted by visions of Beniamina, the enchanting young woman who is no longer in his life for reasons that will later become clear to him. He returns to her palatial but dilapidated home, where Isabella Rossellini presides over a gaggle of chattering, hovering young women who all call her “Mom”, thinking he might find some solace there. Amusingly enough, he does not although Rossellini does furnish him with some no nonsense kindness in contrast to the passive aggressive way she treats her flighty singing student cum housekeeper Italia (Carol Duarte).
Rohrwacher works again here with cinematographer Hélène Louvart, whose credits include “Happy as Lazzaro” and Eliza Hittman films such as “Beach Rats” and “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”. Together they bathe the film in a gauzy haze which gives it an otherworldly feel. we first see Arthur when he’s asleep on a train; an attendant wakes him up teasingly asking if he was dreaming, prompting giggles from the young women opposite him in the carriage. This unreliable mood runs through “La Chimera”, so that we’re never sure what’s real, even as the stakes become more immediate and concrete. Sometimes it doesn’t work Rohrwacher has slapstick sped up sequences, an homage to silent-film style, which feel too quirky and jarring. Similarly, there are frequent changes of aspect ratio which are a needless distraction. But mostly she casts a spell.
Much of this is down to O’Connor’s performance, which is full of interesting contradictions. He’s not a good guy or even much of an interesting one forlorn, shaggy and increasingly emaciated, in his rumpled cream coloured suit with a cigarette frequently hanging from his lips he drifts through the countryside like a ghost. But you want him to succeed in his plunderous endeavours and pull himself and his friends out of poverty because these moments buoy his existence and the film – with a giddy sense of hope. So strong in “God’s Own Country”, recently Prince Charles on “The Crown”, O’Connor brings an air of mystery bubbling beneath his boyish façade (he also stars in Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming much anticipated “Challengers”).
After deftly navigating various tones Rorhwacher puts Arthur in the centre of a moment that is genuinely unexpected, and unexpectedly moving. In doing so she once again proves herself with this film that seems suspended in time as one of contemporary cinema’s most singular and artful voices.
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