Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera (2023)
I grew up as a foreigner in many countries but especially my own. Being mixed race heavily influences my perspective and being half white made me a stand out in my maternal country in the Philippines. I was (and still am) fascinated by Christian mysticism and I think my Filipino family was fascinated at my fascination. Ever since I was a young child, I always believed there were spirits of the past with us.
This feeling came flooding back while watching Alice Rohrwacher's "La Chimera," where the veil between past and present, living and dead feels gauze-thin. Set in 1980s Tuscany, the film follows Arthur (Josh O'Connor), an English archaeologist with an supernatural gift for locating ancient Etruscan burial sites. Fresh out of prison, he rejoins his band of "tombaroli" (grave robbers) while haunted by visions of his missing girlfriend Beniamina. As Arthur dowses for treasures that fetch high prices from wealthy collectors, his connection to the underworld—both literal and spiritual—gradually unravels him.
The slow, quiet pace is absorbing. Every shot is thick with an ethereal feeling as if you can barely see a thin veil between our reality and the spirit world. Cinematographer Hélène Louvart captures the Italian landscape with wild, windswept photography that feels both ancient and immediate. Weeds grow through cracks in pavements, nature reclaiming what humans have built, mirroring how the past persistently emerges into the present. O'Connor delivers a nuanced performance, transforming what could have been an improbable character—part folk hero, part melancholic grave-robber—into someone anchored in reality. His stubbly, scowling presence carries the heaviness of someone who has touched too many things meant to remain undisturbed.
I think about how we mine for what makes us unique and capitalize on it. Nothing seems to be sacred anymore in life or in death. Even the spirit world is for sale. Rohrwacher captures this modern tension between reverence and commodification. There's a devastating sequence where the tombaroli break into an ancient shrine, and the discovery destroys what's being discovered—the rush of air and light into stealing what remained vibrant for millennia in darkness. It's a great metaphor for our cultural relationship with the past: we cannot experience these treasures without fundamentally altering them and our perspectives.
In our modern context of NFTs, cultural appropriation, and the ongoing battles over who owns indigenous artifacts, "La Chimera" feels especially relevant. Arthur's paradox—preserving personal treasures while selling others for profit—mirrors our own uncomfortable relationship with history. We want to both possess and protect the past, and generally failing at both.
From a filmmaker's perspective, Rohrwacher strikes a beautiful balance between the earthy realism of her earlier work and more whimsical elements. My one critique is that we spend so much time with characters at the bottom end of the economic spectrum who are fully fleshed out while the rich/elite buyers seem underbaked. The film offers a nuanced portrayal of the tombaroli and their economic motivations, but the collectors who drive the market remain shadowy figures. It took me out of the world she worked so hard to establish. A deeper exploration of this symbiotic relationship might have added another dimension to the film's examination of how we value history beyond the ability to own it. I want to know what drives that greed even if it is just a general mention of the reason.
Still, "La Chimera" casts a spell that lingers long after viewing—a folk tale that feels both timeless and urgently contemporary. Like Arthur, I found myself become caught between worlds: the living and the dead, the past and present, preservation and destruction. I aspire to capture that sense of neither here nor there in my own work—that liminal space where meaning often resides. In many ways this film reminds me of Victor Erice's "Spirit of the Beehive," a masterpiece that explores the boundaries between reality and imagination through a dreamy, atmospheric lens. I think Alice Rohrwacher has created something magical—a film that, like the ancient artifacts it depicts, feels like it was unearthed rather than made.
