'La Chimera' Review: A Dreamlike Fable of Grief and its Destruction
Alice Rohrwacher’s continued exploration of magical realism is a visual feast full of potential, but something is lacking in the film’s expression of its emotional core.
“You’re not meant for human eyes,” La Chimera’s enigmatic Arthur (Josh O’Connor) says longingly, tears skimming his long, furled lashes as he gazes into the intentionally carved curves of a goddess trapped in marble framing. His words ring true for the piece of sacrilege he holds in his hands (a statue taken from an underground shrine), for the love he can’t help but mourn the loss of, and for the film itself. Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera blooms with riches in its exploration of grief and entertains its audience with a tale of lost love — but with a discordant pacing issue, it fails to fully convince the audience of its profundity.
As the film opens, we are introduced to Arthur, a lanky Englishman who is on a train ride to a small Italian village after being released from prison for an unknown crime. Shrouded in mystery, with a flaring temper and a general pessimism toward his current situation, he tries to readjust to life in the village almost unwillingly, as if his entire being goes against the lively display of Italian joie de vire that is happening around him.
Arthur is a desperate mystic, a medium who, using a divining rod as a conduit, can sense where tombs lie in the ground, as if he’s attracted to the remnants of souls. Having just lost the love of his life — the wild and adventurous Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello), who we, the audience, only see through montages and snapshots of Arthur’s first-person memory — his sixth sense reads as deeply moving yet desperate and feverish in practice, reducing him to puddles of tears or frenzied digging as he pleads to be privy to the other side of mortality’s veil.
He and his group of friends begin robbing graves, taking the artifacts from people’s hidden final resting places and selling them to collectors, gaining a pretty penny for this band of lively rapscallions. The group, which consists of only Italians save for Arthur, begin making an infamous name for themselves throughout the town, digging divinely guided sites around its outskirts and providing inspiration for traveling minstrels who turn their exploits into folklore.
As Arthur embarks on this journey, he periodically visits the sprawling country home, crawling with cracked frescos, of Beniamina’s mother Flora (the incomparable Isabella Rossellini), a character who provides a poignant meditation on the overlap of aging and the specific, unnatural grief that it is to bury a child. Flora’s remaining daughters take in Arthur as if he is a brother, whilst begging their mother to see the truth of their sister’s disappearance and move on from the manor, which is falling apart as her memories fade. Flora’s student and maid Italia (Carol Duarte) serves as a bit of gawkish levity and common sense to O’Connor and Rossellini’s sternly serious performances, giving Arthur the choice between moving on in this realm or holding a candle to the memory of his lost love and keeping her alive in his reality.
In substance, La Chimera is an exploration of grief and intuition, but it’s difficult for the film to strike an emotional note from the get-go, as the pacing feels off. The film dwells on moments that seem of little emotional importance — though visually beautiful — and inherently leaves something to be desired because the characters, though given incredible performances, fall flat with little material to work with. It’s unclear if this is a constraint of the genre or of the ambitious material. It feels like Arthur is still a stranger to the end — and, while this is possibly intentional, it feels as if the audience is constantly on the outside of an inside joke. The first half of the movie feels sluggish, its muted color grading robbing the Italian countryside of its inherent magic and failing to hold the viewer’s attention, and the swift change in pace in the second half feels mangled and disorienting. There’s no denying, though, that La Chimera’s deftly woven ending will leave the audience breathless, despite its emotional center feeling somewhat lacking in the pay-off.
“Nell’anima del mondo, c’è morte, amore, e vita,” — in the world’s soul, there’s death, love, and life — sing the musicians, the unofficial, fated keepers of folklore who punctuate the emotional moments of the film. La Chimera, attempting to explore the thin veils between love and grief and life and acceptance, inherently succeeds in moving its audience with its fearless displays of soul and mysticism, but its narrative structure fails to sustain the weight of its own overly ambitious emotional material.