Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera opens not with a bang, but with a tug. Arthur Harari’s protagonist, the lanky, disheveled Arthur (Josh O’Connor), is yanked back from the brink of the afterlife by a frayed piece of string. He lands on a mattress in a dusty train depot, and we realize we are watching a film about verticality: the pull of the underworld versus the weight of the sun.
On its surface, La Chimera is a heist movie for antiquarians. Set in 1980s Tuscany, it follows a gang of eccentric tombaroli (tomb raiders) who use dowsing rods to locate lost Etruscan graves, plundering them for artifacts to sell on the black market. But Rohrwacher has no interest in the thrill of the score. She is interested in the hole left behind. La Chimera Film
La Chimera asks a radical question: What if we stopped trying to resurrect the past? Arthur is a ghost who can touch ghosts, a man cursed to find exactly what he is looking for and never be satisfied. The film’s magic lies not in the discovery of the lost statue, but in the moment Arthur finally lets the string snap. Rohrwacher suggests that the only way out of the labyrinth of grief is not to find the monster at its center, but to realize that you have become the monster yourself—and then to lie down, finally, beside the ones you have lost. Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera opens not with a