La Chimera is the fourth feature directed by Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher. It is notable for its narrative inventiveness and complexity, and this essay accordingly attempts to reconstruct the logic of a story which initially inspired both my admiration and my skepticism, and left me eager to try to make sense of what I had just seen.
The film’s story centers on Arthur, an English archaeologist turned tomb raider in the Italian countryside. With his skills with a divining rod and his sudden fits of vision (the ‘chimere’ of the title), he has a special gift for finding underground graves, and he becomes the linchpin of a gang of fellow tombaroli that excavates these graves and sells on the black market the beautiful Etruscan artifacts they contain.
This story is the seed of the film’s two primary preoccupations. The first is the mystery of Arthur, who is presented somewhat ponderously as a Man In Pain, a Man With A Deep Secret, whose contents the audience must strive to ascertain. What led to his dark criminal turn? What happened to Beniamina, his “missing” girlfriend whom he keeps dreaming about? What motivates his persistent tomb raiding, which keeps him always on the run from the law, but nevertheless leaves him ragged and poor, living with few possessions in a tiny hillside shack? Beneath his gruff, stoic exterior – the blank expression, the dirty clothes, the unkempt hair and unwashed face, the insistence on keeping the number of words he speaks roughly equal to the number of cigarettes he smokes – is there a depth of feeling, a reservoir of nobility, a capacity for love?
The second is the theme of relationships with the past, a subject inevitably raised by tomb raiding and archaeology, and a matter of particular significance in heritage-laden Italy. The inhabitants of Rohrwacher’s provincial Italian world live among a rich cultural inheritance dating back to the ancient Etruscan civilization, but it is not always clear what should be done with it. Is it dead ancient history, shrouded only in superstitions and old wives’ tales, irrelevant in the globalizing modern world, a harmless opportunity to make a buck? Or is it a source of spiritual guidance, possessing a connection to a living underworld of souls, a rich and distinctive manner of living and dying whose value exceeds any sum of money? La Chimera depicts both tendencies, featuring the earthy vitality of old provincial Italy, but with the tombaroli plot dramatizing the desecration of the past: the temptation, hardly confined to small-time artifact thieves, to pillage and barter a cultural heritage for short-term profits.
In the first third of the film, the narrative proceeds in a disorienting manner, interspersing flashbacks and leaving much unsaid, forcing the audience to piece things together. It eventually becomes clear that Arthur, whom we meet dreaming of his girlfriend Beniamina on a train back into town, has endured some emotionally grueling experience involving a stint in jail, and upon his return is moving between two groups of people, each representing a distinct set of values and way of life.
The first is the gang of tombaroli, the merry band of thieves dependent on Arthur's gifts and thus eager to bring him back into the fold. They initially appear quite predatory. Pirro, the most prominent of the gang, chases him down outside the train station, apologizing for leaving him behind on the night of his arrest, but pressuring him to meet everyone in town waiting to greet him. When Arthur shrugs them off and returns home, he becomes furious when he finds they have stolen his stash of artifacts. But when he confronts them, he learns they were merely hiding them from the police, and he relaxes and rejoins their life of revelry and mischief. They dress up as witches for the exuberant and colorful La Befana parade, celebrating the post-Christmas feast of the Epiphany. That night, they get a lead on a burial site from a man in town, whom they later shut out from the spoils on false pretenses, laughing heartily at their deception. After a successful late-night dig, they celebrate in the morning at a seaside bar, where Pirro offers a philosophical toast: “Those who work hard come off worse / they travel on foot, never by horse. / Those who work hard are full of woe / Those who don’t, make all the dough!” The tombaroli are bantering mercenaries, cheerful swindlers, boisterous thieves, living only for amusement and the next score.
The second are the inhabitants of the dilapidated but nevertheless grand and charming house belonging to Flora, Beniamina’s mother. Flora herself is older and now confined to a wheelchair, and her other daughters are pushing her to sell the house and move to an assisted-living facility. But she is energetic and insistent upon her independence, which she secures by finding domestic servants willing to work for voice lessons and room and board. Flora’s current boarder is a woman named Italia. She is not a good singer – Flora is quite nasty about her abilities – but she sings with gentle earnestness, revealing a tender and ardent heart. She has two young children whom she is able to hide from Flora in the vast house. Both women take to Arthur enormously – perhaps implausibly so. One might expect a mother to be suspicious of her missing daughter’s boyfriend, but Flora makes Arthur a guest of honor, seemingly indulging a desire to pamper and admire the son she never had. Arthur intrigues the eager-for-connection Italia, and over the course of his periodic stops at the house – for food, for bandages, for things he’s left behind there – they develop a bond, nurtured particularly through Italia teaching him sign language. Arthur seems drawn to the maternal, loving warmth suffusing the house, and to the charmed naïveté of these women which lets him temporarily escape the ugly realities of his life.
These two worlds collide when Italia, on an impromptu visit to Arthur’s house, sees the gang outside dividing stacks of cash, the spoils from selling their artifacts to the mysterious “Spartaco”. Each party is wary of the other, but suspicions are suppressed while they all go out for an evening of music, drinks, and dancing. For a while the night seems a happy and festive one: the music is lively and the crowd even livelier, and Italia, dancing as un-self-consciously as she sings, is thrilled to be getting closer with Arthur. But when they leave for a nearby beach, the latent tensions rise to the surface. Italia is disturbed to learn that they often hang out there because it’s an ancient burial ground. When Arthur suddenly has a ‘vision’ and starts digging frantically in the sand, her feelings turn to horror: as the rest join in, she learns the truth about the ‘gifted’ Arthur and his grave-robbing friends. “Those things aren't made for human eyes,” she exclaims in a panic, “but those of souls!” When she is angrily shooed away, she asks, “What about Beniamina, does she know what you do?” She – and, for the first time, the audience – is told that Beniamina is dead, and she runs away.
At first, Italia’s words seem to fall on deaf ears. Arthur and his friends drive forward with what appears a massive score: an enormous underground shrine containing, among other treasures, a pristine marble statue of a goddess with her lion. They decide to section the statue to move it above ground, but as soon as Pirro takes the shocking step of severing the goddess’s head, sirens sound, and they are forced to run and leave everything else behind. When they try to send word to Spartaco, her assistant brings them to a luxurious yacht, where they find to their amazement that she is auctioning the headless statue to a private room of collectors and museum curators. How on earth did she get her hands on it? They demand a meeting with her on the boat’s deck, knowing they have leverage: not only the showpiece head, but the story of the statue’s sordid provenance. She begrudgingly consents and offers to name a price for the head, but when it comes time for Arthur to uncover it, Italia’s words re-enter his mind: whispering “you were not meant for human eyes”, he tosses the head – and with it, an untold sum of money, and the trust and loyalty of his friends – into the sea.
At this point, the film’s ending seems to write itself: realizing the moral gravity of his sacrilege, Arthur turns away from tomb raiding and opens his heart to love. And the following scenes do suggest this redemption arc. While having a cigarette on the train home, a guilt-ridden Arthur sees ‘ghosts’ – visions of passengers from the opening train ride – begging for their burial objects. Back in town, he spots Italia’s daughter Colombina leaving school and, having learned that Flora discovered the children and kicked them all out, he stops her and asks her to bring him to her mother. She takes him to an abandoned train station – like Flora’s house, old and leaky but nevertheless possessing provincial charm and character – where they and a number of other mothers and children are squatting, turning it into a warm and caring home. The group greets Arthur’s presence with jokes and nervous laughter: it'd be nice to have a man to work around the house! That evening he and Italia talk in the makeshift kitchen, resuming their old rapport with sign language until they kiss, and the night ends with Arthur sharing Italia’s bed, one of many clustered together in the one large collective bedroom.
But Rohrwacher hasn't written a redemption story; she's given us something surprising and strange: something admirable in its audacity but something hard to figure, perhaps more an intellectual puzzle to solve than an emotionally resonant narrative. Arthur doesn't even last until morning: awake and restless, he slips out of bed and tiptoes out the door. On the outs with his old friends, he joins a new set attempting a dig at a construction site. He locates a tunnel with his divining rod, and as ‘reward’ he gets to be the first to walk in. But shortly into his descent, disaster strikes: the earth caves in behind him and traps him, the cries above ground barely audible. He follows his candlelight into a cavernous room, where a strand of red yarn trails down from the surface of the earth. He pulls on it and shakes loose a small hole in the ground above, and a shaft of light pours in. Then suddenly, he is above ground, in a sunlit reunion with Beniamina. They kiss, and the movie abruptly ends.
This finale at first seems nothing short of baffling. Besides appearing briefly in a handful of flashbacks, Beniamina is absent from the film. We really learn nothing about her, neither her personality nor how she came to meet and love Arthur. And for all the time we spend watching him on screen, we seem to know just as little about Arthur. Betraying little evidence of emotion or thought, he seemed to be a character we could finally know once he chose between Italia and his tombaroli friends. But in the end, he has chosen neither, and the film ends with the embrace of two lovers whom we don’t really know and until that point hadn’t even seen interact. It seems impossible to feel invested emotionally in this outcome. How can one make sense of this ending?
It seems important to note that the final scenes depart from realism and exist in a magical, dreamlike mode. The red yarn appearing underground is obviously not realistic, and neither is Arthur pulling it and suddenly appearing above ground with Beniamina. And we remember that the red yarn has appeared earlier in several flashbacks to Beniamina, in which we see the red hem of her knit dress get caught on something near the ground, and watch her hurriedly struggle to get unstuck. It seems that Arthur’s underground yarn is connected somehow to Beniamina’s snagged dress. What could this tell us? Might the yarn be somehow invested with symbolic significance?
It could reveal something about the circumstances of Beniamina’s death, for it seems to cast Pirro’s early train-station apology to Arthur – “We honestly didn’t notice you’d fallen behind!” – in a new light. It is clear that Arthur landed in jail because of some tomb-raiding incident, both from Pirro’s apology and the fact that Spartaco paid for the lawyer who got him out. Arthur’s early anger at his tombaroli friends seemed to be for being left in the lurch while the rest of them made sure they escaped the police. But fallen behind: that’s quite suggestive when the main thing we see Beniamina do onscreen is get stuck, and not be able to keep up. Was Beniamina with them that fateful day? We already know that the tombaroli know about her death, since it is one of them who tells Italia, while her mother still holds out hope that she is only missing. Had Arthur fallen behind because Beniamina ‘got stuck’ – trapped, hurt, fallen – and he stayed back to try, unsuccessfully, to help her? That would certainly explain his dream of her in the film’s opening scene, his early refusal to acknowledge his friends, and his constant appearance of being deeply in pain. But even so, that wouldn’t yet explain the significance of their reunion, or the narrative logic in ending the movie that way.
Perhaps its significance lies not on a dramatic, interpersonal level but on the level of allegory. This becomes more plausible when considering the ending in light of the thematic and stylistic oppositions at the heart of the film. Rohrwacher juxtaposes the vitality of provincial Italian life to the sterility of global capitalist monoculture. Her provincial Italy is bawdy, unruly, carnivalesque, enlivened by parades, music, and dancing, animated by the exuberance and camaraderie observed among the tombaroli, enriched by the rustic beauty of its traditional art, with its natural pigments and naturalistic subject matter. Multiple characters possess conspicuously ‘Italian’ features, most prominently aquiline Roman noses, depicted as admirable markers of cultural distinctiveness. The handful of scenes depicting the contemporary world, by contrast, are jarring for their bright, antiseptic digital color palette, and emphasize its rootless, homogeneous, mechanical character. Rohrwacher includes multiple shots of both the sleek glass high-rise containing Spartaco’s office, which could exist anywhere in the world, and the polished steel pistons moving rhythmically in the ship’s engine room. And it is no coincidence that the millionaire collectors and museum dignitaries are pictured aboard a yacht, a luxurious private vessel unmoored from any specific soil and territory, as they happily drink champagne and play the fool about the origins of the auctioned goods.
Rohrwacher also contrasts two forms of the cultural past: the past as living heritage, and the past as monetizable commodity. The actions of the tombaroli, their liquidation of local cultural heirlooms for short-term cash, obviously dramatizes the latter. We also observe this tendency at Flora’s house when Beniamina’s sisters, immune to its antique charm, pressure their mother to sell the house. And although the film does not address this directly, it’s hard not to think of the dilemma of tourism in Italy, in which a lucrative and expanding industry is built on packaging the country’s history and beauty into experiences for visitors. Such monetization of the past is so distasteful because any temporary advantage it provides comes at the expense of movement towards the globalized capitalist monoculture. It unmoors this provincial Italian world from its distinctive folkways, when the beauty accumulated over generations should instead be used as inspiration, as guides for living in the present. Rohrwacher features this living past-as-heritage in Melodie’s reference to archaeology’s capacity to challenge dominant conceptions of the past, in Flora’s house alive with music and art, in the abandoned train station repurposed by Italia and her friends as a group home, and in the folk ballads which are twice used to recap the story not always conveyed clearly by the plot.
So Rohrwacher seems to have left us with something like the following. Beniamina gets stuck: she cannot move quickly enough. In this way she represents the cultural past, and her death the way we destroy what cannot keep pace with the demands of contemporary life. Arthur’s reunion with her suggests the ultimate importance of lingering with the past, of communing with the dead. More important than the vast sums Arthur could have made tomb raiding, and more important even than any happy-ending love story with Italia, is the need to hold on to the string: to maintain the connections between present and past, between aboveground and underground life, between mortal earthly existence and an immortal underworld of souls. For to sunder that civilizing link to cultural memory is to conform to a grasping, corrupt, and colorless modern world, and thus to lose everything.