Nuri Bilge Ceylan maintains an eye for the sublime in hopelessness and vice versa in his latest epic.
Glasgow Film Festival
3 posts
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.
It does well to initially evoke its era. The film’s primary tones are garish neon and sweat on skin, like a grimy San Junipero, and the set design and cinematography do well to create sense of a place where macho sleaze permeates every nook and cranny of the town. The problem is the characters that inhabit it feel too archetypal, too lacking in the eccentricities and unpredictabilities that would make them believable.