Thoughts from the committee
Alice Rohrwacher’s films have always merged the traits of Italian Neorealism and magical realism. The winner of this year’s European Film Award for Achievement in World Cinema, La Chimera is arguably the most seamless blend of her career so far; a thoughtful and moving consideration of the allure of the past, with a few deft touches of magic and mystery to keep us guessing.
Scraping together a meagre existence on an Italian hillside, British archaeologist Arthur (Josh O’Connor) has a supernatural gift: the ability to locate ancient Etruscan tombs. His attitude towards the graves he and his friends rob seems ambivalent at times, but Arthur has a deep fascination with the artifacts they find. The certainty of his perspectives takes a significant hit when Arthur meets a young woman, conveniently named Italia.
Awarded with significant prizes at Cannes and Telluride, La Chimera can be a difficult film to categorise, but it has an entrancing ability to retrace its steps, so to speak. Moments and motifs come back, are reconsidered, and suddenly set the characters on new courses. Rohrwacher’s film excavates not just the ancient history of Italy, but also its modern identity, with a small but significant role played by the grand dame of Italian cinema, Isabella Rossellini.
“The film’s riches come from Rohrwacher’s seemingly inexhaustible wealth of ideas [including] the tactile, textural quality that results from dipping into different film stocks.” – Wendy Ide, The Observer