A few years ago, I watched Alice Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro. I admired the film in all respects, but I also can't recall what it was about. I remember there were some peculiar vertical landscapes in the movie, flowery quarries if memory serves. But I don't recollect a thing about the movie's plot or characters. I suspect that I may have the same future response to La Chimera -- the film is beautiful, packed with odd incidents, and wonderfully eccentric characters. But it's also diffuse, sprawling in its own understated way (the film is two hours and eleven minutes long) and more a matter of tone and atmosphere than plot. La Chimera is a fine film, but, also, curiously aimless.
Rohrwacher's narrative paradigm is to supply an image that is difficult to interpret and, then, a few minutes later, casually show something that explains what we have previously seen. We are continuously interpreting retroactively, that is, using information provided later in the movie to understand something earlier shown. This means that La Chimera has to be watched carefully. In one scene, the protagonist encounters a group of people; a woman is applying make-up to a chubby, plain-looking man. This seems odd, but, a few minuteslater we see that the man is riding on float in a parade, some sort of small-town agricultural festival, and he has been made-up for that appearance. The structure of the film also invokes this principle of deferring explanation until later in the movie -- for instance, the hero's interactions with some people on a train in the first scene only comes into clear focus at the end of the movie when the identities of these fellow-travelers is explained. This structural feature (mystification resolving into understanding) is consistent with the film's plot which involves archaeology and how the past inflects the present.
La Chimera is set in Tuscany, but this is, most assuredly, not the picturesque Italian terrain beloved by tourists. Rohrwacher's Tuscany is impoverished, full of marginalized people of the sort we would call "white trash" in American parlance. No one is honestly employed and the skies are mostly grey and dreary. A retired, and partially paralyzed, opera singer (Flora played by Isabel Rosselini) lives in a villa that is crumbling around her. The protagonist squats in a lean-to shoved up against one of the towering, faceless walls of the village -- it looks like a hard wind could blow the shack down. The neighborhood is dominated by a huge, industrial power-plant that looms over a greenish-grey bay. The hillsides are pocked with shadowy wet-looking niches carved into the rock, an Etruscan necropolis, and there are tumulus hills, also with tunnels bored into them. The characters in the movie are mostly Tombaroli -- that is,,grave robbers who eke out a living by breaking into the Etruscan tombs and stealing the grave goods interred with the skeletons buried under the muddy earth. Arthur, the film's main character, for some reason an Englishman, has served time for theft of antiquities and seems to have been just released from prison when the film begins. After being taunted by some odd-looking people on the train, he returns to the hill-town surrounded by Etruscan tombs, a place where there are two rival gangs of Tombaroli. Arthur is seeking his girlfriend, Beniamina, who has gone missing. (He dreams of her wearing a knit skirt with a red thread that has unraveled and appears to be embedded in the soil under her feet; the film's first shot, Arthur's vision of Beniamina peering around a black threshold is explained only in the picture's last half hour.) Beniamina's mother is Flora, a retired opera singer who lives in a decaying palace. Flora has a servant, Italia, a young woman who attends upon the imperious older woman, working for her in exchange for singing lessons. (The lessons are in vain, Italia is tone-deaf.) Italia has a baby and, in fact. a ten-year old daughter. These children live somewhere in the crumbling palace, hidden from Flora -- we see them literally concealed under beds. Flora has innumerable squabbling daughters, at least five or six, and this profusion of children suggests something mythological about the character -- it seems odd and, even, supernatural for one woman to have so many adult daughters, but this is a premise in the film that is established, but not really developed -- it's an aspect of the movie, like many other features that is simply shown but not dramatized or given any real significance. Arthur goes to see Flora who seems unable to tell him where the missing Beniamina has gone. Gradually, he's sucked back into the underworld of antiquities' thieves. Arthur has a peculiar gift, called "la Chimera" here meaning something like "second sight" or "visions". He uses a dowsing rod to find buried tombs and goes into a sort of visionary frenzy in the presence of these graves. His unique talent is highly regarded by the other Tombaroli. The grave-robbers are working for a shadowy figure named Spartaco who has a network for the retail of stolen archaeological artifacts. Finds unearthed at the tombs are brought in dog-carrying kennels to a corrupt veterinarian who, in turn, sells the objects to Spartaco. The tombs are not located in exotic places but seem to be everywhere underfoot, in vacant lots and construction sites and among the dunes by the seashore. Ultimately, the grave robbers find a buried temple, some sort of hypogeum, in which there is an astounding marble sculpture of a naked goddess surrounded by votive offerings. It's million dollar find. But Arthur is ambivalent about disturbing the temple. (One of his colleagues brusquely knocks off the head of the goddess in a scene that is as shocking as anything you might watch in a horror movie; Arthur protests in vain.) The rival gang contrives to seize the temple and loots it. Arthur with his gang members go to a yacht moored somewhere off the shore of Croatia, it seems, where Spartaco is auctioning the body of the goddess to museum buyers. Arthur shows Spartaco, who turns out to be a beautiful woman, the head of the goddess. But, then, he hurls it into the sea, providing the occasion for a spectacular underwater shot in which the goddess' lifesize marble head is sucked into the silt on the bottom of the sea. Arthur goes back to the hill-town where Italia has freed herself from Flora's palace -- Flora seems to have been put in a nursing home, probably suffering from dementia. Italia, with several other women, is squatting in an abandoned train station where she is running a kind of day-care center and women's shelter. Italia obviously likes Arthur and the affection is mutual but he is still searching for his lost love, Beniamina. After spending the night with Italia at the day-care, he leaves at dawn and wanders to the necropolis, parts of which seem to be under a new parking ramp under construction. There he finds yet another tomb, enters the grave, and encounters Beniamina.
La Chimera is full of surprising images and the film is designed so that the supernatural casually and naturally interacts with realistic depictions of Tuscan life. The sky is full of starlings and it seems cold and rainy. At the Day-Care, the children have lice and so we see them being deloused with pink plastic bonnets over their heads. There's a remarkable shot of the frescos in the buried hypogeum instantly losing their color due to oxidation when air from the outside is introduced into the underground sanctuary. Italia seems to be some kind of witch although her powers are not clearly defined. There are odd dance scenes on the dunes next to the sinister-looking power-plant. As with Happy as Lazarro, the landscapes are defined as primarily vertical -- the little car operated by one of the grave-robbers can barely get up the steep grade leading into the hill-town which seems to be comprised of ladder-like chutes and alleys. Arthur's squat leanto against the city walls is shown from overhead, the camera perched atop the ramparts. There are Brechtian interludes in which a singer performs a ballad about the exploits of the Tombaroli. Italia who seems humiliated and subservient in the first part of the movie becomes a powerful and domineering figure by the end of the film.
The world, La Chimera shows, is made up of innumerable intersections between the living and dead. The goddess, Arthur proclaims, is "not made to be seen by human eyes." The story resists meaning and obstructs any sort of abstract interpretation. Things are what they are shown to be but also exist on a supernatural plane. The film uses an interesting device to show Arthur's chimeras or visions; the camera tracks down from his face to the ground and, then, somehow rotates so that we are seeing Arthur upside down, poised over the vault of empty sky and hanging by his feet. This idiosyncratic suggests interpenetration of the realms of the dead and living. In the final scenes, Arthur sees himself reflected (and upside down) in a puddle and this is where he tells the looters to use their backhoe to dig. No one, it is said, is interested in the "tombs of the poor folk like us..."
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