Glasgow Film Festival: La Chimera

Alice Rohrwacher returns with another masterful work, furthering her case as one of the great film-makers of her time.

The advertising for La Chimera is bizarre. If you don’t believe me, watch the trailer. I know it’s the oldest trick in the book for distributors to sell their films in as straightforward a way as possible, but Jesus Christ, trying to sell La Chimera as a taut heist film is doing no one any favours. Its only resemblance to The Italian Job is that there’s Italians, and well bugger me they’ve got a job to do. What there is instead, in typical Rohrwacher fashion, a film that defies categorisation, that hovers at the space where divinity meets the reality of a world where greed curdles all corners of life.

Without wanting to give much away, as its a film more than most where knowing as little as possible adds its mysterious grace. The film follows Josh O’Connor’s Arthur, a young man returning to a rural Italian town after time away, falling in with the same gang that got him sent away in the first place.

From this simple premise the film glides through Arthur’s world with magnificent grace, allowing the audience to piece together his life from snatches of dialogue, murmurs of facial expression and his detached demeanour. Rohrwacher and her team do a spectacular job of constructing its world, one patched together far from the metropolitan economic boom that was coming, one that remains mystical, with history fogging up from every mound and ditch. The characters are left to roam this landscape, a perfectly pitched but authentically messy tumble.

Josh O’Connor, who I had hitherto marked up as an actor from the Cumberbatchian (public) school of big posh gonks with no particular screen presence, is magnificent. He is never the fireworks of any scene despite being in near every frame, but is a quietly magnetic centre that draws everything towards him, his sullen, downcast exterior belying a world of pain skirting behind his eyes. The same too can be said of Isabella Rosellini, playing Flora, a maternal figure from Arthur’s past; she is cantankerous, tender and wise in equal terms and gets most of the film’s laughs in the process.

Pier Paolo Pasolini has been cited, and it’s a fair comparison; there’s a lot of him in La Chimera‘s tumbling narrative and the raffish band that surrounds Arthur, but Rohrwacher is increasingly moving in a space all of her own, one that manages emotionally dense, intellectually ambitious, formally bold film-making that maintains a steely-eyed look at the challenges humanity faces without ever approaching sanctimony. A true spell of a film.

-Joe Creely-

La Chimera had its UK premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival and is released in cinemas on 10 May 2024.