la chimera (2023)

[portico]

 

my friend is a screenwriter and attends film festivals, so my general rule of thumb is: if she loves it i will see it. it has served me really well. this is why i was determined to see la chimera (2023), written and directed by alice rohrwacher, which premiered at cannes. if you're someone who enjoys films that function as art and are willing to take things on faith, i highly encourage going into this movie blind. i am so glad that i did. if you'd like to hear more about it, read on.



la chimera follows arthur, an englishman living in 1980s italy with a unique ability: he can dowse for antiquities. the film begins as he is returning from a stint in prison, presumably due to his habit of grave-robbing, but we're not told directly. this is one of the things i enjoyed the most in this film: it tells us almost nothing directly. arthur falls back in with his grave-robbing crew, as well as with the mother of his lost love, magnificently played by (who else?) isabella rossellini. the lost love is beniamina, only glimpsed through arthur's dreams, and appearing young and fresh in a way that arthur plainly hasn't been for a long, long time.



the film was shot on 16 mm and 35 mm film, and feels like it. it's grainy and blue tinted in a way that's almost tactile, like i could reach out and touch it like the photos in an old album. the corners of the picture are rounded, although the aspect ratio changed throughout. i had that wonderful brian eno quote in mind from the beginning: 

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”



the grainy film is exciting but it also serves to remind us that we're all guilty of the same thing we're watching arthur do: strive towards the past. he's caught between needing to touch the past--his drive to find tombs seems compulsive, and once he's found one he collapses shuddering to the ground like a berserker at the end of a battle--and wanting badly to respect the wishes of the people to whom the past belongs. the film's climax sees him finally forced to decide where he stands after he's confronted with the reality of who is benefitting from his finds (a fun bit of job relevance for me, personally).



i adored this film. i love a story that begins in the middle, i love a movie that doesn't tell me anything explicitly, and i love art that takes big swings--and artists who aren't afraid to make art that feels like ART!! this was all of those things and more. beautiful, beautiful.