A Grave Situation

Alice Rohrwacher’s movies take place in a dirty Italian countryside whose spontaneous bursts of magic aren’t enough to overcome the capitalist cultural sprawl that threatens its pastoral scene. Her directorial tics cement themselves further in her languid latest, La Chimera. Arthur, a British ex-con (for graverobbing, of all things), returns to mope around his old Italian village stomping ground, shrugging off then forgiving his old tomb-raiding crew for more adventures. La Chimera implies he’s an archeologist of a more official variety, but only ever hints at his fall from grace; stumbling around in the same dirty tan suit all movie is one of many visual class metaphors in the film.

Not only that, he’s some kind of diviner as well, with a gift for dowsing that ends in a fainting spell above the randomly dug Etruscan tombs beneath forest and beach. He has one foot in the grave and one in the past, an anachronistic thread that spans Rohrwacher’s ouevre, with dreadful implications here that rise to the level of dystopia. 

The most noteworthy quality of La Chimera is its sensation of being out of time. Between the historical subject matter, the dirt-poor village exteriors, the 19th-century manor interiors of Arthur’s would be mother-in-law and the pauper costumes, the temporal dislocation is more than just its slow pace interrupted with silent comedy framerate boosts. It’s intentionally hard to ascertain the cultural context of our merry “tombaroli” crew’s crimes, as its ethical dilemma of plundering the dead’s grave goods is dependent on the suggestion that the dead’s spirits would linger.

Ghosts visit Arthur in one of the film’s better scenes, asking where their prized possessions have wandered to. He’s in between more worlds than just rich and poor. Once the film makes apparent his connection to the dead, it feels as if the ineffible macguffin that could center that relationship in between the worlds of the living and the dead may well be such an object. Arthur’s underground sojourns certainly seek it, physical or otherwise. 

The only time when the period of the film becomes slightly more apparent is when our straggling rogues parlay their scavanged goods for cash in visits with their black market buyer. This “Spartaco’s” office is no back alley, but a bright yellow vet’s office with a very fancy, impersonal dumbwaiter for the trinkets. Later, Spartaco appears in person, aristocratic aboard a splendid yacht whose insectoid, industrial pumps even seem to glisten gold, hosting a private auction to recycle the dead’s private treasures into superfluous, upper crust curios.

The look of the film outside of these scenes, shot on 35 millimeter, grain intact, is predominantly wintery and dulled, drenched like our graverobbers in loam rather than sunny European country lushness. The saturation of the colors in these scenes connote the change in class atmosphere. Even if such neon sugar brights are “trashier” than Neo-neorealist cinema in America today, it’s just a testament to our excess. The aesthetic shift signifies a temporal stratification as well; the burgeoning, dystopic austerity of our end of history, texture-killing plasticity. The vampires dragging us forward to year zero here seem close to acquiring all under the burning sun. 

The film is flush with formal play beyond thematic color scheme shakeups. Lightning intercuts, aspect ratio mixups, camera flips, and as mentioned fast framerate shake up the poverty guilded frames. Despite that, La Chimera’s spellbinding but pokey neorealist meander might overrule its formal play. Your mileage will likely depend on your rapture within the ethereal, paranormal mystery of Arthur’s, and Italy’s, anachronistic malaise, which subjective aesthetics will either aid or mar. It’s OK to admit that a nature-backgrounded Cannes competition film shot on 35 millimeter is unpleasant to the eye.

The working-class grit of Rohrwacher contrasts and muddies the magic of her milieu. Some narrative tension does finally form midfilm upon the discovery of a particularly splendid tomb, but the economic stakes for the tombaroli don’t rise to the level of a true thriller. It’s a melange of ideas, a Chimera to be sure, but its coherence is suspect and it’s no overstuffed gonzo smorgasbord.