With that pained, little-boy-lost quality of his coming to the fore as soon as he opens his eyes, O’Connor is ideal as this director’s latest scruffy muse. It’s hard to think of a recent film which has doted this fondly on the face of its leading man, who’s first caught sleeping on a train in a besotted close-up. When O’Connor’s in the frame, Rohrwacher’s camera (the photographer is the brilliant Hélène Louvart) is gleaming right back at him.
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In so doing, she puts a sweet gleam in his eye, perhaps the first sign he might relearn how to be alive.
One woman in their circle (a lovely performance from Brazilian actress Carol Duarte) goes to the lengths of teaching him the language of gesticulation – those pinched fingers and hand wobbles Italians use as silent slang. They’re all delightfully bemused by Arthur, a persistent stranger in their midst with his filthy suits and imperfect Italian. He’s a dowser, who can use a divining rod or just his natural antennae to sniff out relics underground, and as such has become the lynchpin of a small troupe of “tombaroli” – grave robbers.īefore any particular narrative pushes through, we amble about in a very Rohrwachy fashion with this burly clan, and meet their matriarch of sorts, a retired opera singer animated with sparkle, in a wheelchair, by Isabella Rossellini. It belongs to the late love of the main character, a forlorn Englishman named Arthur (The Crown star Josh O’Connor), who has made himself a base with a tin-roof shack in the Etruscan countryside, beside a ruined old wall. One early shot here could almost symbolise her art – there’s a thread of red yarn attached to someone which literally disappears right into the earth, and we realise that its owner, trying to tug it loose, is in heaven. If you’ve seen any of Rohrwacher’s earlier work (Corpo Celeste, The Wonders, Happy as Lazzaro), you'll know how tethered it is to tradition, ancient mystique, the laws of the land. Such is the singularity of this director’s vision, her tender love of the Italian soil and the culture rooted in it. There’s a sudden act of violence in the middle of La Chimera, the latest ethereally beguiling film from Alice Rohrwacher, which made me clamp my hand to my mouth in horror – even though it’s perpetrated against a piece of statuary.
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