The line of life hangs like a red thread constantly linking us back to the earth.

Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023) is undoubtedly a movie about our relationship to life and death. Set in the heat of a 1980s Italian summer, it follows a group of tombaroli - grave robbers - selling Etruscan artefacts to make money, led by a failed archeologist, Arthur, whose girlfriend Beniamina died offscreen before we are introduced to him. Languid and soft, the entire movie is dreamy: it screams gentleness like a foreign caress. Halfway through Pasolini’s Accattone and Lucas’ Indiana Jones that the director cites as her inspirations in writing the script, La Chimera is a tale of human nature, exploring both its constant need to hang on to material possessions and its fear of death.

Navigating through mosaics and the beautiful blue of Mediterranean skies, the film, no matter the breezy ambiance, bears a heavy sense of nostalgia for a time and a place that the viewer doesn’t and has never heard of. In the same way Paris, Texas (dir. Wim Wenders) portrayed the American desert a few decades ago, Rohrwacher offers us a postcard of Tuscany, an almost romanticization of living in misery with cigarette smoke that impregnates the movie with a putrid odour and salty water washing over ramshackle shelters for homes. The cinematography is deeply Italian in its display of horizons, constantly oscillating between the industriality of the 1980s modern home and the remains of the splendour of the past: antiquity of long gone blue tiles buried under the sand on a beachy shore welcomes cement and plastic chairs in a party scene, shows how accommodated people are to the dichotomy. What is monumental and grandiose for the historian is everyday life in Italy. Possessions lose their sacrality, they are accepted for what they were at the time of the Etruscans, useful at most, to make money, to eat in, to sit on, something we can not find anywhere but in Italy - with the exception of Tunisia’s Carthagian ruins maybe, to which this so called dichotomy also applies.

The characters are simplistic and feel like almost bad caricatures of a Fellini movie dissecting society in the 60s - only they don't delve into the opulence of bourgeois Rome but rather live in countryside ruins no matter their equally greedy nature.

The protagonist - paradoxically complex in comparison - almost endures the story instead of leading it; unlike them, he is never truly one to take action up until the very last moments of the film. He doesn’t dig the graves, only finds them thanks to an almost divine gift that links him to the dead. Coincidentally, this so-called gift matches the everlasting mourning of his dead girlfriend, to whom he reaches constantly through the red thread of her dress in dreamy flashbacks throughout the movie.

The first scene is already representative of the rest of this narrative we are about to follow Arthur - played by an excellent yet almost mute Josh O’Connor - sits on a train back home, surrounded by teenage girls who gossip about him. O’Connor is a captivating presence, an almost ghost to his plot, enigmatic yet hypnotising. He is not intended to be the main character of the story, he only follows it desperately, navigating his way through life just like everyone, with the exception of having no remorse to rob the underworld, to break the line between the living and the dead. And he is indeed, right on the margin: a phantom - almost constantly dressed in a white suit that we see decomposing throughout the film - swaying between the loud vivacity of Italian life and the death of his partner. He is Sisyphus and she is his stone, constantly coming back to haunt the picture, to link him to earth, the dirt; to death.

This marginalisation is exacerbated by the language barrier: an Englishman in a small Italian village struggles to speak the dialect and eventually uses sign language in one of the later scenes with his love interest, Italia (Carol Duarte), her name already evoking the inevitable downfall of the romance: he is not in love with a woman but with a country and its history. Indeed, this so-called love interest is mistakenly presented as the reason he might repent, and give meaning, owe respect to death beyond the need for money. Halfway through the story, he refuses to sell the head of a statue that his friends decapitated in a tomb and throws it in the sea, whispering: “Non sei fatta per gli occhi degli uomini” (You are not made for men’s eyes) fooling us into believing in a redemptive climax although he eventually ends up exactly where he started the film: underground in a grave, looking for treasures. Ironically, his pursuit of life in his “job” led to his death.

Is greed beyond all morality what the movie is denouncing? Not quite. Or at least, it is not the only thing it focuses on. The greed dissipates but the sadness never does.

Always present in its inherent absence, death draws the contours of the story, and gives it rhythm and meaning. The postulate is quite simple but universal: we can never run away from grief or our seemingly determined fate. This idea is particularly enhanced with the use of traditions that link back to the myths surrounding the foundation of Rome, a constant mix of both the occult and history: whenever a transition is made in the plot, birds fly from right to left on the screen, reminiscent of patricians taking the auspices before a war, of giving one’s fate up to God or divine superpowers.

Nonetheless, this sense of the occult is paradoxically met with a materialistic representation of loss and death: there are skulls dug into the ground, the artefacts that the Etruscans would bury the dead with to save their souls in the Afterlife. It first asks the question: what will remain of us after we die? Is it the memories that people have of us or is it what we once held dear: vases, drawings, and dishes?

No matter how abstract the idea of death might be, how powerless we are in front of it, Alice Rohrwacher is clear in saying that we still hang on to consumption, objects that we once gave life to and loved to avoid the fear, the loss and the grief. In an Interview with Anne Elizabeth Lemoine (Josh O’Connor en majesté - C à vous - 30/11/2023), Josh O’Connor recalls a conversation with the director where they got to a rather depressing conclusion: nothing much is left of us after death nowadays. People are no longer buried with their goods and there is nothing to retrace our presence on the planet. Whereas the Etruscans might have left ceramic pots as offrands to the gods, we only leave forgotten plastic toothbrushes on the bathroom sink.

But can we ever really escape these hurtful memories, our chimaeras? “Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.” Joan Didion remarks very cleverly in Blue Nights. Arthur spends the entire movie trying to avoid Beniamina’s death, he is quiet, doesn’t mention it until halfway through the film, and tries to keep living the same way he did before she passed away: he is in complete denial. Moreover, the only character he seems close to, who he truly appreciates, is her mother who also ignores her daughter’s passing. Therefore, not only does she represent this gate, an almost purgatory between the two worlds, that the movie longs constantly to portray through her old age, lacking the vivacity that Arthur seems to despise so deeply but she also crystalizes what he is feeling: the illusionary blindness. The story eventually leads us to believe that there is a possibility after death, a reconstruction, a new beginning but it is all worthless.

Profoundly nihilistic, the movie is explicit in showing that we can never escape hurtful memories and that we are doomed to carry them with us until we are also buried deep underground. It’s a cathartic punch in the gut and a mirror of human nature that digs - like an archeologist - deep into our fears and our losses, the seemingly forgotten memories of our loved ones passing away. It replays the images of one’s family member’s funeral and how life had to go on after it. It is the silence surrounding us like a hood for eternity and the bitter feeling of an absence, the scent of an old belonging lingering when all life is gone from it.

In that way, the last scene when Arthur finally rejoins his dead lover is the only moment we see light through the tunnel, the only moment we see his face shift, break in sadness, and the red thread that serves as a leading redundancy to the story finally let loose.

La Chimera is a cocoon, or at least it felt like mine for a while: I curled under it like a bruised animal and prayed it would work as a shield, no matter how thin, against the brutality of the outside world, keeping the sadness of the grief away.

Meriem Ben Mimoun

la chimera (2023): A tale of death and greed

The dis-pronounced

sway, spin, jump, die.