Amber Ward reviews La Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher (2023).
Alice Rohrwacher’s 2023 film La Chimera is full of colour and light. I first watched it in the summer when it came out on MUBI and I watched it twice, two days in a row. I wanted to squeeze everything out of it, wring it dry, but when I came back to it in the winter it just sort of grabbed me and pulled me in. Set in small-town Tuscany in the 1980s, the story follows Arthur, an English archaeologist, and his gang of local graverobbers who seek the ancient artefacts buried beneath the ground. It’s an original, humane story about the relationship between past and present that balances so many contrasts all at once. It’s eerie and warm; pensive and quick. Everyone’s a bit weird, but they’re familiar too.
The film begins in a kind of middle, leaving you stranded in the present, searching for the context you need. We first meet Arthur on a train, detached and neurotic. He’s clearly been through something and later on it’s hinted that he’s spent time in jail. When he arrives in a small Tuscan town it’s as though he’s come home. Everyone delights in his return. But Arthur is unmoved, his friends frustrate him, and his mind keeps flashing to images of his lost love, Beniamina. Important things have happened that are unclear, so you try, like a little archaeologist, to piece the past together from present-day clues.
Arthur, it is revealed, has a gift for locating the sites of ancient Etruscan tombs. He enters a sort of trance and, using a forked rod to guide him, falls to his knees when he lands upon the exact spot. Then he and his gang start to dig. They enter the tombs and loot the fine antiques – pots, plates, little toys – buried with the dead to help them make it into the afterlife. Unbothered by spirits, the gang flog the goods on the black market to a wealthy, stuck-up dealer from the art world. Everyone whispers about the bandits and their ‘maestro’, the Englishman, and the police are certainly onto them. Some express horror or fear. At one point Arthur is chided by Italia, with whom he has a bit of a spark: “Those things aren’t made for human eyes”, she tells him cooly, amidst the frenzy of a dig, ‘but those of souls.’
But other locals are enchanted. The gang of graverobbers – or ‘tombaroli’ (tomb raiders) as they are affectionately called – have a cult following, including a balladeer who documents who they are and what they do. Don’t clutch at your pearls, he tells a small crowd during a folksong: “Just think, dear folks, what the law’s there for: to protect those who exploit your labour. What’s the point of judging then? The tombaroli are just a drop in the ocean! Ah, a drop in the ocean!”
What Rohrwacher does so well – and what makes the film feel so refreshing and new – is how she portrays tradition, history and myth. Both the ancient past and the recent past are everywhere in the film, providing the cultural material out of which the present-day action is born. But the past is never portrayed as a singular fixed thing that the characters engage with as such, nor does it straightforwardly determine how they think, act or feel. Every character rather interprets and constructs the past in different ways that are meaningful to them. Whilst some are bound by ancient superstition, others connect with their heritage by celebrating the tombaroli and their latest steal. Melodie, a young photographer who arrives to document Arthur at work, gives a feminist reading:“If the Etruscans had still been here there wouldn’t be all this machismo in Italy. Did you know the women were in charge in Etruscan times?” For Melodie, the Etruscans were: “so bohemian, so distant from the myth of the Roman world.”
In La Chimera, the past is only ever allowed to exist in the present: plural, contingent, always being re-made. And the clothes, the cars, the toxic waste discharged onto the beach and into the sea mean you are never allowed to forget that you are in the 1980s. It’s a story that is less about myth than what you choose to do with it, and how there is always choice in how we decide to relate to our past. Indeed, Arthur – the heartbroken foreigner returned to the land of his lost love and of the ancient culture he adores – is only haunted by spectres because he wants to be.
La Chimera is streaming on MUBI.
Amber Ward teaches history at St Andrews university.