It is a strange, beautiful, and devastating film—a folk tale about capitalism, colonialism, and heartbreak, where the real treasure is the permission to stop digging.
Rohrwacher shoots this world in two registers. The sun-drenched surface—full of squabbling thieves, pasta dinners, and a chorus of middle-aged women singing off-key—is rendered in warm, grainy 16mm. It is chaotic, earthy, and alive. But when Arthur dips his rod and feels the pull of a buried chamber, the film cuts to 35mm, and the colors bleed into dream. The subterranean world is quiet, solemn, and full of the dead. Rohrwacher does not moralize about the grave robbing; she treats the tombs as libraries, and the tombaroli as illiterate poets who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.
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.