LA CHIMERA: REVIEW AND INTERVIEW WITH ALICE ROHRWACHER
by ALEXANDRA BENTZIEN
Each of writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s films focuses on the persistence of Italian history and cultural heritage—or, simply put, the past—in a contemporary society wherein processes of modernization and industrialization grate against a desire to preserve traditional ways of life. A dream, a memory, or a hypnotic blend of both disintegrate the boundaries between past and present in the very first frames of La Chimera, Rohrwacher’s most recent film, in which the young Englishman, Arthur (Josh O’Connor), leads a ragtag band of grave robbers through the Italian countryside along grandiose quests to steal artifacts from Etruscan tombs. Aiding Arthur in his search for these ancient sites is a unique gift that turns the world topsy-turvy, a recurring twist that highlights Rohrwacher’s poetic penchant for visualizing the potential of the magical to join the real.
Like the director’s previous films The Wonders (2014) and Happy as Lazzaro (2018), La Chimera resides in a world resembling our own and the ones we know from storybooks; the act of remembering through filmic texture attains kinship with the act of imagining through cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s humanistic lens. The foundation for La Chimera’s more lighthearted sensibility is a mix of loss and longing, from Arthur’s fraught struggle to grow through grieving his lost love, Beniamina, to facing a pivotal test of morals that lead the film toward a more philosophical discussion on the nature and meaning of art, its proximity to the human soul and its significance as a commodity.
With each foot seemingly in two worlds–underground and overground, past and present–it may seem that Arthur is the film’s eponymous character. As the story progresses, however, its title traverses new dimensions. Chimera are scattered throughout the film in the form of characters and places, anachronisms and palimpsests. A classical voice lesson given by none other than Isabella Rossellini introduces us to Flora, Beniamina’s grandmother, herself a relic of a bygone era in a house of peeling paint and wallpaper. Perhaps the nostalgic timbre of Flora’s recollections and the place she calls home is akin to the scratchy aspirations of Carol Duarte’s Italia, who sings hopelessly off-key and yet accomplishes what Flora can’t, breathing renewed vitality into the weather-beaten local train station, transforming it into a shared home for women and children. And then there are the tombaroli, grave robbers, who, like tall-tale characters, throw precious loot into their satchels indiscriminately, to be cast into hastily dug-up hiding spots, all the while bearing dollar-sign eyes as they dart light sources around a tomb whose profound sanctity becomes discarded for profit as quickly as its pigmented walls are oxidized. They too breathe new life into the past, recklessly unearthing it and bringing it to light.
While a lack of cell phones, a deluge of oversized sweaters and ladies’ shoulder pads, and a mischievously placed excerpt of Kraftwerk’s “Spacelab” illuminate the film firmly in the 1980s, its central concerns remain present. Then as now, the zeal of the tombaroli to uncover precious artifacts isn’t rooted solely in a passion for art and history, but a desire (and a necessity) to earn a little extra cash.
The tension between art and the many tangible and intangible ways it is valued legally, monetarily, culturally, and historically serpentines throughout Rohrwacher’s film. As liaisons to the human soul, and as conduits to other souls, and other times, the art Arthur excavates might act as a chimera capable of transcending present and past realms to bridge various lives and stages of life, from life and death to resurrection. It’s easy to vilify the rest of the tombaroli and glorify Arthur, who, in the midst of a slipshod midnight excavation experiences a decisive moment of transcendent clarity upon discovering a priceless Etruscan statue. Arthur’s subsequent exchange of his band of happy misfits for a life that seeks something deeper, something richer, than what one’s hands – or eyes – can behold seems momentarily like the good choice, the right thing to do – a well-dressed and well-mannered Englishman turns his back on crime to reform toward a simple, pastorale life undergirded by family values. But whether for the allure of art or the allure of profit, the call of treasure is still laced with the human plague of want: a chimera represents a being between and within several worlds–a desire whose fulfillment is impossible to achieve, an unrealized dream, an illusion.
INTERVIEW
The continual juxtaposition of multiple possible worlds alongside a philosophical consideration on the multitudinous and complex nature of art imbues La Chimera with an exquisite intricacy, creating a story that is timeless as it inhabits an intriguing, folkloric yet relevant, time beyond time. Upon the release of her latest film, nominated for the Palme D’Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, Alice Rohrwacher discusses the themes within La Chimera, in a conversation illuminating the writer-director’s interests in clashes within time, the film’s historical background, and first of all, music.
I wanted to start off by speaking about the music in your films. It always stands out to me (I still listen to the Ambra Angiolini song you featured in The Wonders). What inspired the sound in your film, the sound design as well as the songs featured in La Chimera?
Music for me is the most important thing in a movie. Before I became a filmmaker my dream was actually that of being a musician, and I’ve played for a long time. Maybe for this reason I’ve always carefully chosen the music that I put in my movies. It’s as if I distilled it, because music has so much value for me that I’m always afraid that I’m not respecting it enough; I’m always afraid that I can exaggerate when I’m using music. That was something that stopped me a little bit in the past. In La Chimera, music is extremely important.
First of all, we’re talking about the 80s [in La Chimera]. The 80s are a time when there is a great breakout in the music scene, and I wanted for that to be present. I wanted to have three sound sources, so to speak, three sound themes. On the one hand, you have 80s music, and so you have the first experiments with electronic music – you have Kraftwerk, you have Vasco Rossi, and you have all the music that animated those years. Also, what I call vintage ones, the songs that are played at the party at the electric facility. And then I also wanted music that would go side-by-side with the development of Arthur’s destiny in key moments. Arthur’s destiny is connected to what happens to a mythological hero, Orpheus of Orpheus and Eurydice, so I chose Monteverdi’s Orfeo, which is an opera I feel very close to. I chose that to mark the chapters, so to speak, in which Arthur needs to make important decisions about his destiny: when he goes back home, when he meets the tombaroli – the tomb robbers – for the first time, when he meets Flora, and then when he finally decides to go away and leave Italia at the abandoned station.
This music is in some parts diegetic, in other parts extra diegetic, and I wanted that music to enter the storytelling process. I wanted for this movie to be a song, and so I also included a character of a troubadour, of a ballad singer; I wanted to have a musician that could tell the story, as a storyteller, so that he could tell the characters about their story, to specify that that story is not the story of a single individual, but the story of a community, of a group of people that belong together, that belong to a greater community. And that’s why I invented the character of the troubadour, and as storytellers, to be included at a time when the identification with the characters might be too strong. They’re there to create a sort of distance, to tell the audience, you know, stop here, what you’re watching is a movie, what you have in front of you is a story, this happens, that happens, and that other thing happens.
As you mentioned, the musical influences and palette in the film is very broad, from Monteverdi to Kraftwerk. In all of your films, you have this juxtaposition between very traditional Italian culture and rustic lifestyle with a modern time; there’s the party in the electric factory, as you were saying. I’m wondering what interests you about this tension between past and present in contemporary Italy?
Well, clearly, I live in a country where this contrast is particularly strong. The coexistence of different eras is one of the most apparent qualities to travelers that come to Italy. In a way I think that this coexistence of different ages can tell us something, that can teach us something, for example, about how to build: how to build without becoming enslaved to the past or destroying the past, how to build creating harmony between all these different layers. Obviously I can’t really explain this because it’s part of me, it’s part of my gaze. For example, I live next to an ancient volcano, and everything here is made of many layers, even a tiny stone that I pick up from the ground – if I look at it carefully, I can identify all the different layers. And I believe that cinema does have this strength, the strength of combining, in a single image, different eras, different times, different journeys, so that we can understand that there is no conflict between them, but that there can be great sharing.
Now I’m curious to know how, and why, you were inspired to tell the story of the tombaroli, because their story is really seeing the past becoming present through artifacts, which are both art, and goods for sale.
The world of archaeology, be it the lawful one or the unlawful one of trafficking of the archaeological artifacts, is something that always attracted me. I grew up in a world that was full of tombaroli, of tomb or grave robbers, because actually in this region where I live, there’s a saying that “the dead give life.” Especially in the 80s and 90s, the treasure that people lived here before us had buried was the object of a hunt by thousands and thousands of young kids that wanted to take it and sell it to make money. I’ve always wondered why, after 2,500 years, after nobody had touched those items, all of a sudden, everybody felt entitled to steal them, these sacred objects, and sell them.
In the beginning it seemed to me like something that was a little bit like a folksy thing; then we went to dig into this subject and I realized that it was connected to a much deeper shift in human beings, the arrival of materialism. It is something very deep: it’s the moment in which things stopped being animated, they stopped being considered as sacred, and they just became things, objects. And that allowed the arrival of tombaroli, because objects belonging to the dead became objects that could be sold, that could be commerce of those items, and therefore I thought that, even though the issue was very specific, it was connected to something much broader, much more universal, because it’s something that happened within human beings. And even a human being that lives very far from this region, from this region where the Etruscans were, well they felt, they perceived the shift between a world that was full of soul to a world that is now full of things.
In Arthur’s character, you see a tombarolo who has the capacity to view these artifacts, or this art, as containing this soulful essence, while other tombaroli like Pirro seem more concerned with just the material value of these goods. What led you to this question of seeing the different ways art can be valued and is valued?
Arthur is a remain of the Romantic world; he himself is an archaeological remain. He is himself inspired by all those young people that would come to Italy from northern England, from Germany, to visit the ancient ruins, to do the so-called Grand Tour. And they were characters: when you read those diaries of those romantic young men who were in love with Italy, they would fall in love with a fresco, with a statue, with a ruin, and I was wondering what happens to such a romantic young man who suffers because of a lost love and is thrown in a world that is already sort-of the forefather of the contemporary world, that is a materialistic world. He just explodes, you know, he loses it. His greatness and his heroic nature in the tombaroli world becomes almost ridiculous and funny. Therefore I wanted to take this contrast, this clash, between these two approaches.
Arthur’s gift is that of perceiving emptiness, because Arthur has emptiness within himself, and at the same time it’s a gift he has that can be helpful for everybody. It can also be helpful in this world that is populated by people that only focus on money and on getting rich. And they are supported by Arthur’s gift of being so sensitive.
I’m wondering, in your preparation for this film, were you able to speak to any archaeologists or any former or present-day tombaroli? What was that process like?
Naturally, our research for this movie took a long time and I did speak to a lot of former tombaroli, so to speak, because this activity is illegal right now, so you will not find anyone that will identify as current tombarolo: they’re all former tombaroli. I also spoke to a lot of archaeologists, and my research process moved to the interior of museums, because I wanted to understand how the trafficking of these archaeological objects works. Up until the early 2000s it was very unruly and unregulated, and in some countries it is still like that, for example in the Arab world there is still trafficking of very important archaeological items. I also spoke to the Carabinieri, the Italian local police that is responsible for safeguarding artistic heritage.
It’s definitely a movie that stems from a much broader research process. All of this material was included in this story, which I decided to set in the 80s, both because it is a time that the archaeologists label as the time of the great looting, so the time in which the greatest number of sacred places were robbed overnight, and also because it’s a time in which laws were not very straightforward yet, so it was very difficult to prosecute legally those who would steal such archaeological objects, but also because, as I was describing earlier, it corresponds to a time of deep interior transformation of a way human beings felt.