LGM Film Club, Part 556: La Chimera

Alice Rohrwacher’s 2024 film La Chimera is certainly worthy, though with some significant flaws. It tells the story of Italian grave robbers, who steal Etruscan treasures to sell on the black market. The focus is on a British archaeologist turned rogue who just got released from prison, played by Josh O’Connor, who has suddenly been everywhere the last few years. And then he has his local crew who really are only in it for the money. But this is not a film with a lot of articulated character development and that’s not a bad thing. In fact, there are hardly any real conversations through the movie. But there’s a lot of faces, a lot of looks, and a lot of background conversation happening around O’Connor. And yet, the characters do grow. He used to be married to a now disappeared and probably dead woman and when he gets out of prison for his grave robbing, he goes back to visit her mother, who is Isabella Rossellini. There are lots of sisters there too and Rohrwacher does what almost no director ever does–all the siblings actually look like siblings. They are all redheads of around the same height, all busybodies, and yet have different personalities too. Then there’s Rosselini’s live-in music student/assistant, played by the Brazilian actress Carol Duarte with great success. She’s got a couple of kids and is raising them on the top floor of the house where Rossellini can no longer go, without the family knowing.

Over the course of the film, O’Connor gets back into his grave robbing, the kids get found out, O’Connor and Duarte kind of start a relationship, there are folk songs written about O’Connor’s grave robbing, and then they have the big find. This is brilliantly shot. It’s a full on temple. Rohrwacher sets it up so that there’s a camera inside when it is opened and you can see the air dim the glorious paint, already diminishing the power of that temple, And of course it doesn’t go well in the end either. The whole time as well, O’Connor is wearing this white suit and as he descends into a sort of madness, he becomes just filthier in it, a good metaphor for the corruption of this archaeologist and what’s he become.

Now, some of this is very very silly. O’Connor is considered a genius because he can find underground tombs with a divining stick and I mean, why go this way? An actual divining stick? There’s also some very frustrating scenes where Rohrwacher speeds up the camera to make it look like silent film slapstick and it just doesn’t make any sense to do this. It’s distracting while adding nothing.

But overall, this is a pretty fine film.