You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
― Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”
Like poetry in motion, Alice Rohrwacher’s magical realist film La Chimera feels like wading through dream space. Rohrwacher casts a spell on us; she gathers an array of sunlit images, sounds, and performances to weave this striking meditation on loss, fate, national identity, and masculinity. With weighty yet delicate cinematography from Hélène Louvart–who switches effortlessly between 35mm, 16mm and super 16 film stocks at ease–Rohrwacher plays across multiple genres to excavate a tale that must be seen to be felt. La Chimera cycles through genres with effortless aplomb, cheekily placing traditional modes of storytelling alongside Italian folk song asides and surrealistic fourth-wall breaking documentarian narration to trace a story of lost love. Following frumpy archeologist-cum-graverobber Arthur (Josh O’Connor) as he traipses across southern Tuscany with his itinerant dragged-up tombaroli in search of Etruscan artefacts, Arthur navigates the ephemerality of memory itself, reaching across time to find his lost beloved Beniamina (Yle Vianello). An out-of-time narrative displaces Arthur as it displaces us. This is a film untethered from the modern world as we know it, and in its temporally dissonant register, La Chimera becomes timeless.
What strikes me as one of the most important aspects of this film is Rohrwacher’s critical eye for Italian film history, and as such it feels like this history is condensed into these two hours or so. From a style indebted to the surrealism of Federico Fellini, to the poetic loneliness of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and to the neorealist Taviani brothers, Rohrwacher paves her own way, cementing herself as perhaps one of the most important Italian filmmakers of today. Considering these influences, it is also to no surprise then that Isabella Rossellini is cast as the loving matriarch and aristocratic mother of the lost Beniamina. Rossellini is the beating heart of the film, and her live-in servant, Italia (Carol Duarte), is the hands. Italia teaches Arthur sign-language, and they make a language together. For a brief moment, there exists a possibility for Arthur to make a life for himself beyond Beniamina’s shadow, but his desire is to look back, like Orpheus, back to the past, to the dead, to those who can’t speak overrides it.
This is a film that feels so different–it vibrates, intoxicates. After watching, one’s psyche is forever marked by its spirit. How on earth Alice Rohrwacher managed to infuse the anima of Orpheus and Eurydice into this charm of a film, unearthed for us to bear witness, is beyond.