“La Chimera” directed by Alice Rohrwacher and released in 2023 is one of the movies selected by Vatican Official and film expert, Msgr Dario Viganò, to be part of the Dicastery of Evangelization’s “Jubilee is Culture” initiative. Father Greg Apparcel, CSP, film critic, associate pastor of St. Patrick’s Catholic American Parish in Rome, and the Paulist Fathers’ Procurator General to the Holy See brings us this review.
By Fr. Greg Apparcel, CSP
Perhaps all of us have one goal in life that has been elusive. Everyone has their own chimera, something we want to accomplish, but it’s always one step beyond our reach. Besides being a fire-breathing female monster in Greek mythology, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines chimera as “an illusion or fabrication of the mind, especially an unrealizable dream.” In the new film “La Chimera,” by Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher, the chimera of the protagonist is finding his lost love Beniamina. His name is Arthur and he is portrayed superbly by Josh O’Connor (“The Crown,” “Challengers”).
We meet Arthur on a train. He is unkempt, to say the least. We soon find out that he has just been released from jail and is returning “home” to a small town in Tuscany. We’re in the 1980s and Arthur is dreaming of Beniamina’s face and then the red thread she keeps pulling from his knit-dress. Both visions come into his head throughout the film. The women in his train car try to engage him in conversation. A salesman tries to sell him clean socks and cologne because of his odoriferous state, Arthur violently pushes him away and scares the others with his behaviour. As Arthur leaves the train, they call him “a six-foot criminal”. He gets a ride from Pirro who wants to meet up with their old tomb-robbing gang, but Arthur just wants to go home to his shack and get his “stuff”. Arthur’s home is as much a mess as Arthur is – he’s depressed, dishevelled and very angry. He needs to visit Signora Flora (portrayed by the wonderful Isabella Rosellini). She is in a wheelchair, taken care of by Italia, her student singer/servant. “Finally, you came,” she tells Arthur, “I told you he’d come back. This is Beniamina’s boyfriend.” And as she is Beniamina’s mother, she says to him, “Find her. Don’t lose hope.”
He sees the shrine that Flora has made for her daughter: her photographs with a candle lit before them. Her daughters and granddaughters come to visit and tell Arthur he looks sick and needs a job. Flora keeps hearing a baby crying and they tell her it must be a lamb nearby. He goes home to his freezing shack and wakes in the morning to find Italia. “Signora Flora asked me to bring you some things.” He’s feverish and coughing, but still smoking and drinking. He clearly is in a bad state.
It is now that we discover why Arthur was in jail. His hidden treasures have been taken and he runs to his old gang. They were just trying to keep the antiquities for him so that the police or Spartaco, the local henchman, wouldn’t find them. He looks at his small Etruscan objects and finally smiles when they make him join the Epiphany parade. They are in various costumes in honour of the Befana, the witch-like old woman who delivers gifts on Epiphany eve. Arthur is stone-cold drunk now, and the blond Melodie offers Arthur a gig, for he is known as The Maestro. He and his gang, known as the tombaroli (or grave robbers), go to a place where antiquities were found before. He makes a new divining rod, a dowser, and slowly walks around the area looking for buried treasure, in reality, buried tombs. Breathing hard, he falls over, but it’s a trick to get rid of the hangers-on. Arthur and friends return in the middle of the night and dig, finding a burial chamber with bones and many ordinary household objects that are over 2000 years old. Though Arthur truly is a criminal, he is in love with archaeology, and his friends sing of his renown.
In the meantime, we discover that Italia too has a secret: she has a daughter and a baby son, both of which she has kept hidden from Flora. She teaches Arthur some useful Italian gestures so they can communicate secretly. He gives her a little bell, a campanello, but he does not tell her where it’s from.
The tombaroli bring their loot to Spartaco, who, though expecting better, buys them all. And they divide up the cash. Celebrating, Italia joins them in their dancing. Arthur takes her toward the water to show her a nearby necropolis. She doesn’t like it. But the place has many memories for Arthur, and he sees Beniamina’s face and the red thread from her dress. Breathing hard, he falls. He’s lost in his chimera. “We open tombs, that’s how we make money,” he tells her. She realizes the little bell he gave her is from the tombs, possibly a child’s grave, and says that these objects . . . “are not for human eyes but for the eyes of souls.” She wants to call the police and ask them if Beniamina knows about this. He finally admits that his love is dead and tells Italia to go home. She says: “I curse you.”
Of course, the really big discovery of a buried shrine soon appears and we meet the real Spartaco. Arthur is affected by Italia’s reaction and keeps thinking that these things are not for human eyes. He has a confrontation with his gang and with Spartaco while seeing Beniamina in his head. And he does something that angers all of them and causes a rupture.
And here’s where hope begins to drift in and I can see the reasons why this film was chosen to connect with the upcoming Jubilee of Hope. Arthur is back on a train, which stops in a tunnel. He sees the people from the beginning of the film: the conductor, the young girls, the salesman. They all ask him if he knows where their “grave goods” are. They had them and now they’re gone. He leaves the train as the singer and the triangle player sing the ballad of Arthur the Dowser, which is about life, death and love. He walks down the highway, then through a field of dead sunflowers (it being January). He goes back home to find his shack being torn apart by the police. He is filthy, sunburnt, and friendless. But Italia’s daughter comes to save him. She gets him cleaned up and brings him to her mother who now lives in the deserted train station with other women and their young children. They want him to stay and be their servant. He wants to but there’s that chimera. And so he goes off again, back to the tombs, and there he discovers what he was looking for all along.
This is a lovely movie, with colorful characters, and interesting film techniques – sometimes 35 mm, sometimes 16 mm, and sometimes speeded-up film. And Josh O’Connor shines in this role. To go from Prince Charles in “The Crown” to become Arthur (and speaking fluent Italian, by the way), he is a revelation. The countryside and sea are beautiful, though the industrial areas built over the tombs are disturbing. Not everything is meant for human eyes, and our hope lies in what our souls will see. And maybe looking for our own chimera will help us find the fulfilment of our lives. As lyrics, the Ballad of Arthur the Dowser proclaim “All he longed for was a full life.”
