Unearthing the Myth: A Deep Dive into Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera”
In the rolling hills of modern-day Tuscany, where the Etruscan underground is as rich with history as the soil is with olives, director Alice Rohrwacher has crafted a cinematic fable that feels both ancient and urgently new. La Chimera (2023) is not merely a film; it is a requiem for the dead, a heist comedy for the melancholic, and a philosophical treatise on the dangers of looking backward.
(played by Josh O’Connor), a British archaeologist with a mystical gift for "divining" the location of subterranean Etruscan treasures. The Tombaroli : Arthur is part of a band of (grave robbers) who loot ancient burial sites for profit. San Francisco Chronicle The Quest for Beniamina
🎭 Some films leave you. Others linger like a half-remembered dream. Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera is the latter.
Themes
- Memory and the Past: The film repeatedly returns to how physical artifacts carry history and longing; Arthur’s work literally unearths the past while his emotional life reveals personal excavation — trying to retrieve a coherent identity.
- Displacement and Belonging: Arthur’s statelessness (both cultural and social) makes him a liminal figure; the tombaroli operate on the margins of legality and community, reflecting wider questions of who belongs and who is excluded.
- Moral Ambiguity and Economics of Loss: Rohrwacher resists simple moral judgment. The tombaroli’s trade is illegal, yet their skill, folklore, and need are treated sympathetically; the film probes the complex ethics of heritage, poverty, and survival.
- Myth and Transformation: The title, “La Chimera,” evokes a mythical hybrid — a fitting image for a film about mismatched lives, illusions, and the shifting form of identity and desire.
The film opens with Arthur stumbling off a train, disheveled, wearing a mismatched white linen suit that looks like it was stolen from a dead poet. He has just been released from prison. He returns to a makeshift commune of eccentric grave robbers led by the wonderfully brash Italia (Carol Duarte). They are a chorus of comic incompetence—men who use a bent stick to find tombs and celebrate a single intact vase like it’s the World Cup. They are scavengers, yes, but Rohrwacher grants them a strange, shabby dignity. They are not villains. They are peasants trying to claw a living from a land that has stopped yielding crops, so they harvest the dead instead.
Director Alice Rohrwacher and cinematographer Hélène Louvart utilize a unique visual style to blur the lines between reality and myth. By mixing 35mm, 16mm, and Super 16 film formats, they create a texture that feels both ancient and immediate.
The Etruscan Connection
Unlike Rome or Greece, the Etruscan civilization is often forgotten. They were the precursors to the Roman Empire, a mysterious people whose language remains largely untranslated. La Chimera treats the Etruscans as the ultimate "Other." The art looted in the film is not just treasure; it is the physical evidence of a silenced culture.