A few quick notes to start:
My new novel, Small Rain, is out on September 3. Please preorder it by asking at your local bookstore, or from your favorite online retailer. Here are a few links: Bookshop, Powells, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Amazon. There are even more links at the Macmillan page.
I’m still a little miffed about the fact that in 2015, when I asked to narrate the US audiobook of What Belongs to You, they wouldn’t even let me audition; an actor narrated it instead. But Picador UK said yes, so I recorded it all those years ago, in a little studio in London. That version has never been available in the States. But now, almost ten years later, lo and behold, here it is, newly released for US listeners. You can get your copy here, or from libro.fm (support independent bookstores!), or from Audible, or wherever else you get your audiobooks. I’ll be in the studio recording Small Rain later this month; that recording will be available on September 3. Preorder it here.
Back in 2020, I had a very lovely conversation with Clemency Burton-Hill for WNYC’s The Open Ears Project, a show that invites guests to talk about music that is especially important to them. I talked about the British composer Benjamin Britten and the music he wrote for his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, with special reference to the gorgeous final song from Britten’s cycle Winter Words. Just weeks after we spoke, Clemency survived a devastating brain hemorrhage, from which she has heroically recovered. The season of the show she recorded before her medical crisis is being released now. You can listen to the episode here.
Ok. Now: Alice Rohrwacher’s new film, La Chimera.
*
It begins with a dark screen, with nature sounds: insects, a mourning dove’s cry, intimations of an unseen world. Then, a woman’s face, framed in close up, looking into the camera—but we don’t see it entire; part of the screen is obstructed or blacked out, and then with a click the obstruction slides across the screen, fully obscuring the image before partially revealing it again. The effect is like looking through a View-Master, one of those chintzy photo slideshow toys (we’ll see a child holding one to his face in the next scene) sold at tourist traps. My lost woman’s face, a man’s voice says (all quotes are approximate, reconstructed from notes scribbled in the dark), and the woman laughs and looks at the camera questioningly, turning away to reveal a sun tattoo on her shoulder. Then there’s a cut to the real sun, seen through trees, glimpsed through the window of a moving train. Cut to the woman again—the sun is following us, she says, have you noticed?—before finally we settle on the image of a man, hunched in a corner, sleeping on a train in an ill-fitting, cream suit at once elegant and rumpled, his face bisected by a slowly moving shadow.
It’s a very beautiful visual representation of a traveler’s broken half-sleep, shuttling us between subjective vision and objective world. It also, though there hasn’t been any exposition, introduces us to a story: the scene with the woman is the man’s dream; the woman is the man’s beloved; the woman is lost. I’ve narrated it so minutely—it probably lasts less than sixty seconds—because it also serves as a seedbed for the film’s incredibly dense and intricate construction. Each image—the woman, the sound of insects, the mourning dove, the sun—will recur, accruing meaning over the film’s two hours. This is typical of Rohrwacher’s films, though I should say—and I know real cineastes will be aghast: Rohrmacher has made three other films, and her debut won the Grand Prix at Cannes—I didn’t know anything about La Chimera or its director when a friend invited me to a screening at BAM last week. I’ve learned some things since—I went back to see the film two more times over the subsequent few days, and have watched all of Rohrwacher’s other features—but actually my ignorance was a pretty good condition for encountering the film. Or let’s call it innocence, a state of unpreparedness that left me ideally open, ideally defenseless, before the film’s many surprises.
In each of Rohrwacher’s films, I’ve discovered, there’s something that stands to the side of workaday life, especially the often brutal workaday life the films take as their subject, a moment of what I experience as wonder. Children sipping from a shaft of sunlight in an otherwise dark barn; a young girl caressing— reverently, erotically—a life-sized wooden statue of Christ; organ music leaving a church in pursuit of itinerants kicked out by an irate nun. In this newest film, it comes when an Etruscan shrine, sealed off for two millennia, is broken into—an act we experience, magically, from the point of view of the shrine.
La Chimera is the third in what Rohrwacher has described as a loose trilogy of films exploring the question of “what to do with the past.” In Le Meraviglie (The Wonders), a cheesy TV reality show dresses up farmers and beekeepers in campy Etruscan costume, while in their real lives they struggle to meet demands for modernization and dream of converting their farms to BnBs. In Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazarus), an isolated village is trapped in indentured labor by a corrupt, aristocratic plantation owner in a nightmare reenactment of the feudal past. (Eventually liberated, the villagers discover that modern urban life isn’t much of an improvement.)
La Chimera follows a band of tombaroli, looters of archaeological treasures—lovable, bumbling tomb raiders. In interviews, Rohrwacher has said that the illegal trade in artifacts in Italy in the 1980s and 90s was larger than that in drugs. In sequences that combine Indiana Jones with the Keystone Cops, we see the tombaroli (there are seven of them, like the fairy tale dwarves) comb over already looted graves, finding artifacts that, for all their beauty, their dealer, the mysterious Spartaco (played deliciously, once we meet her, by Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s sister), dismisses as nearly worthless, spoils of “poor people’s tombs.” And then, one night, partying on a desolate strip of beach by an power plant—the water is radioactive, one of them warns; electrified, another says—they find something extraordinary: an untouched shrine, complete with a statue of a goddess the value of which is, literally and precisely, unimaginable. (We are here to estimate the inestimable, Spartacus will say later, when the piece is brought to auction.)
But this is only one of the film’s engagements with the past. The tombaroli are led by Arthur (Josh O’Connor), that man we saw on the train, an Englishman with a mysterious, supernatural gift for finding lost things. He’s a dowser, not for water but for artifacts; we will watch him slowly pace fields with a forked branch in his hands. These sequences might have been mined for whimsy, of which the movie has its share, but instead they’re treated, I think smartly, with a matter-of-fact attention to logistics. Arthur holds the branch with a kind of experimental alertness; he keeps wiping his hands on his suit, as if trying to clear a circuit. They’re also treated with gravity. When he catches a signal, Arthur starts panting, his body laboring; the branch in his hands slowly rotates, pointing up and turning back toward him, making a complete circle—a movement the camera in a couple of moments imitates, coming to rest on the image of Arthur inverted. Then he collapses, ragdoll-like, as though, having been filled with an electrical charge, he’s suddenly released.
We don’t learn much about Arthur, or about any of the movie’s characters; this is a narrative almost without backstory. At the beginning of the film he has just been released from prison, having been caught by the police on one of the tombaroli’s outings. (We didn’t see you had fallen behind, Pirro, the most individuated of the gang, tells Arthur when he picks him up from the train station.) All we know of Arthur’s deeper past concerns his relationship with Beniamina, the lost woman from his dream; and all we know of that, pretty much, is that it existed. We will see flashes of her throughout the film, little fragmented glimpses of scene, none of which lasts longer than a few seconds. In them, Beniamina is wearing a knitted, rainbow-colored dress, a red thread from which has come unraveled; we will see her trace this thread, gathering it in her hands, back to a plant on which it seems to have caught, only to find that in fact it has entered the earth. Entered, or emerged from: another motif—where does the thread come from, where does it end, irresolvable—that will return.
Arthur’s first act after returning to the shack where he lives, one of a series of shanties built outside the town’s medieval wall, is to visit Beniamina’s mother, Flora, played radiantly by Isabella Rossellini. She lives in a large, once lavish, now crumbling manor house—the film will linger on its cracked frescos, its once beautiful details—where she waits for Beniamina to return. She lights up on seeing Arthur, whom she clearly considers a son; she asks him if he has found Beniamina, she tells him not to lose hope. The viewer may already wonder whether Beniamina is merely missing or dead, and whether Flora is living in a kind of suspended animation, a fantasy of expectation—a desperate, doomed strategy for dealing with the unbearable past. That Beniamina is dead is confirmed for us fairly late in the film, and Flora is forced to acknowledge this even later. Isabella Rossellini’s face at this moment is devastating, one of the film’s indelible images.
Flora’s disenchantment comes at the hands of her daughters and granddaughters, a kind of chorus of nagging voices. They’ve found a job—a proper job—for Arthur (he’s not interested), who they feel is living “on the shoulders” of their mother; one suspects their concern is less for their mother than for their own inheritance, however paltry. By the end of the film they will tell Flora that they’ve found a nursing home for her, pushing her out of her grand, collapsing home, her shrine to her lost daughter. The scenes with these sisters are remarkably constructed, their voices overlapping, often indistinguishable, with single phrases emerging from the muddle. In the credits, the daughters are grouped together as Le Sorelle, The Sisters, as if they were all together a single character; the band of tomb raiders, too, is presented en masse.
This choral treatment of characters is typical of Rohrwacher’s films. It’s a remarkable technical achievement; in a panel at the New York Film Festival, Rossellini expressed her surprise that the scenes were fully scripted, not improvised; she described Rohrwacher rehearsing them as a conductor would an orchestra. The comparison is clarifying; in the scenes with le sorelle, I often thought of the family in Puccini’s great Gianni Schicchi, another group of meddlesome, avaricious relatives. (In the same scene where they tell Flora they’ve found an institution for her, one of the sisters holds up a lamp, asking if she can take it; they’re already divvying up the goods.) But the film’s treatment of character is also bound up with Rohrwacher’s deep, recurring preoccupations. She’s fascinated by the institutions of communal life—families, villages, churches—and the relationships, nurturing, oppressive, necessary, between such institutions and individuals. The choral groupings she constructs (each film has one or more), mostly formed by nonprofessional actors, make these institutions dramatic characters; they grant them filmic presence.
A voice teacher, Flora manages to get by, to the extent she does get by, with the help of Italia (Carol Duarte), a young woman whom she grants lodging and voice lessons in exchange for household service. We meet Italia as she’s breaking up furniture to burn in the frigid house. Rohrwacher is fascinated by labor and exploitation; her films frequently trace a kind of circulation of force, the way exploitation cycles through communities. This is one form the relationship between the individual and the group can take, and one of Rohrwacher’s most urgent concerns is whether the cycle can be broken or transformed. In each of her films, or in each grouping within her films, there is a character who receives the brunt of their compatriots’ demands. In Lazzaro, the villagers, exploited by the Marchesa, heap exploitation in turn on the title character, who serves as a kind of factotum; they laugh about how gullible he is, how easy to exploit. In Chimera, Flora’s daughters acknowledge that her mother calls the tone deaf Italia a student in order to have a servant for free. The character who serves a similar function among the tombaroli quotes Figaro’s great aria of labor from The Barber of Seville: “Fabiana qua, Fabiana la,” she mumbles resentfully.
All of this, I’m realizing, makes the film sound quite heavy, with its obsession with the past and analysis of labor; in fact it moves with remarkable lightness, and it’s very funny. As Italia, Carol Duarte gives a great comic performance, as does Vincenzo Nemolato as Pirro. Something remarkable about Rohrwacher’s film is how it slices and dices genre, how many films it manages to be at once. In the relationship between Arthur and Pirro, it’s a buddy comedy; in the tomb raiding scenes, an adventure; in the tombolari’s escapes from the cops, a slapstick caper. When the tombolari confront Spartaco for fleecing them of their great find, the film, staging a dramatic encounter with an until-now-concealed villain on a yacht, veers toward James Bond. In Arthur’s dreams of Beniamina, it’s an elegy; in his relationship with Italia, a romantic comedy. This composite structure is echoed visually in the film’s use of several different aspect ratios and image qualities, from grainy home video to slick montage.
The tomb raiding sequences, which lead to the tombalari’s great find and then their great loss (a rival gang, dressed as cops, chases them off the site), constitute one of the film’s long lines of narrative energy. The other comes with Italia, and with the slow, shy, very moving romance she constructs with Arthur. Italia’s name suggests allegory, though exactly how it maps onto the film’s narrative isn’t clear to me. In the panel discussion, Rohrwacher says that her name identifies her with “the country Arthur loves so much.” This love isn’t really explicit in the film, though; we don’t know what has brought him to the country. The single fact we know about Italia’s back story is that she’s Brazilian. “Andiroba, jacaranda,” she says wistfully, in a beautiful moment, remembering the trees of her childhood; though she speaks Italian fluently, we will also hear her speak Portuguese. Maybe “Italia,” assuming it is her given name, represents a kind of ancestral desire, her presence in the country the fulfillment of a parental dream. In any event, the romance between Italia and Arthur is managed with great delicacy. In Arthur’s first visit, Flora orders Italia to bring him some coffee; she returns almost immediately with a cold espresso—a sign of the household’s economies. Flora is outraged and demands that Italia make another fresh, but Arthur insists it’s fine. In the glance Italia gives him one sees both gratitude and surprise. This is a minor intervention in the cycle of exploitation that is the film’s vision of labor, but a meaningful one—and it will be echoed, later, when Italia more forcefully intervenes to stop a bartender from being berated for badly mixing her drink.
Arthur discovers Italia’s secret—she has two children, an adolescent girl and a toddler boy, whom she hides from Flora, sealing them in her bedroom and sometimes forcing them to hide beneath the bed: another of the film’s variations on images of above and below. (One of the posters for the film features Arthur in the posture of the Hanged Man from the Tarot deck, echoing the several times we see his image inverted; he hides his artifacts beneath trees that look, Italia tells him, like people buried head-first in the ground.) This discovery opens up an intimacy between them. Italia will offer Arthur Italian lessons; later, Arthur will give her an ancient bell, one of his finds: worthless but beautiful, and a reminder, or maybe a redemption, of a cruel thing Flora said of Italia earlier, when she called her “stonata come una campana,” tone deaf as a bell.
Arthur resists this romance, and in early scenes—when Italia shows up at his house, bearing coffee from Flora; when she appears unannounced as the tombolari are divvying up their earnings—we see both his interest and his reluctance. Just before he makes his big find, in one of the most pleasurable scenes I can remember from a recent film, we watch him fall in something like love. Arthur, Italia, and the gang are all at an outdoor concert, all in their finest clothes. Italia is being teased by the male tombolari, apparently enjoying it, certainly holding her own. In an absolutely marvelous sequence, worthy of the great actors of romantic comedy—of Diane Keaton or Meg Ryan, even of Rosalind Russell or the Barbara Stanwyck of Ball of Fire—Italia starts dancing, not elegantly or sexily but ridiculously. For a long moment it seems like she might remain ridiculous, that she might be opening herself up to humiliation; we see the worry of that on Arthur’s face, as he stays on the sidelines, watching. But a kind of confidence gathers around her, a kind of conviction, and then we see the tombolari joining her, making the same moves, and it’s clear that she has made herself the star of the evening, the center of gravity. This is clear on Arthur’s face, too, he can’t take his eyes off her; and it’s clear on the face of Fabiana, the often put-upon factotum of the group, who glances from Arthur to Italia and back again, confirming that what we see she sees, too. The tombolari come closer; Italia flicks up her dress; suddenly they’re surrounding her in a way that’s clearly importuning, erotic. It seems she’s still enjoying it, but Arthur loses his cool (he loses his cool at several points in the film; he carries a compelling, slightly scary violence coiled beneath his skin) and breaks in, giving up his indifference and laying a claim to her. They run off together, pursued by the others; later, on the beach, they hang back from the group, and Italia very beautifully lays her head against Arthur’s shoulder. And then, just as some real intimacy might begin, Arthur is pulled away from her by one of his “chimeras,” the magnetic pull he feels from hidden treasures.
Italia isn’t just the film’s love interest; she’s also its conscience. She’s horrified when she learns what the tombolari are doing, how they make their money. When she realizes they’re going to open a tomb there on the beach, that they’re going to snatch whatever they find, she demands they stop; those things were not made for human eyes, but for souls’ eyes, she says. Italia is the voice here of what the film calls “the law of the dead,” the claim the dead have on their grave goods, a claim the tombolari never take seriously. (This mention of “the law of the dead” comes in one of two songs—performed, Wes Anderson-like, by a group of musicians who enter, with utter disregard for realism, just for this purpose—that serve as both narrative device and moral commentary.) Italia’s outburst causes a rupture with Arthur, and the other tombolari chase Italia off; it seems like they might turn truly menacing when she says she plans to call the police. But Arthur has heard her objection, and will flare up himself in violent disgust, moments later, when the other tombolari break off the head of the beautiful goddess, “sectioning” the statue for transport. At the climax of the tombolari plot line, in the confrontation with Spartaco, Arthur will echo Italia’s words as he makes a crucial renunciation: he will throw this head, the one piece of the statue the tombolari carry off and their proof of the statue’s illegal provenance, their leverage over Spartaco, off the side of the yacht.
Before he throws it into the water, Arthur cradles the head with almost unbearable tenderness; the color of the marble is an exact match for his suit—an harmonic consonance and emotional charge the film has held in reserve for almost two hours. We follow the head as it falls, first looking up, through the water, at the yacht, as though we were inhabiting the object’s POV; then we see it strike the ocean floor, where it sends up a dramatic cloud of sand. Arthur’s act is a renunciation not just of a priceless, impossibly beautiful artifact, but also of his friends, the community from which now he’s exiled. It’s also, if not unequivocally, a gesture that interrupts one of the film’s cycles of exploitation, the exploitation of the objects themselves. The victims of this exploitation will be given voice a few moments later, in a surreal sequence where characters from the film’s opening scene on the train return as emissaries or voices of the dead, asking Arthur to help them find their missing grave goods.
Almost at the end of the film, Arthur will seek out Italia again. He finds her with a group of women and children, squatting in a dilapidated, abandoned railway station, the property, as Flora told her earlier in the film, of everyone and no one. A temporary situation, one of the women says to Arthur, though the women are working to rehabilitate the building; life is temporary, Italia adds. It’s a utopian, matriarchal community, a vision of earthly paradise. But a paradise with lice, which the children have contracted; the vision of them playing on the long disused train tracks, plastic bags taped over their treated hair, is one of the most wonderful things I’ve seen in ages. Pure life, I thought as I watched it—and this is the climax of this narrative line of energy, the line of Arthur’s romance with Italia, because those are the stakes, life or its opposite; that’s the choice Arthur confronts. Will he choose Italia and life, this earthly happiness above ground; or will he choose the world of the dead, of Beniamina and the artifacts. (I know you can’t live knowing those things are down there, Pirro says to Arthur early in the film.) This isn’t a morally loaded choice, a question of light and dark understood in simple terms; it isn’t even a question of health versus morbidity. It’s a choice between loves. We see Arthur and Italia kiss, finally, passionately, in a way that promises more, a perfect ending to a romantic comedy. Then Arthur pulls away. He wakes beside her the next morning, but their sleep has been platonic; they’re fully clothed, in a room with the others, Italia’s toddler in the bed with them. Arthur touches Italia’s wrist tenderly as he climbs out of bed; he pets a dog tenderly as he slips away.
Writing about Mia Hansen-Løve’s extraordinary One Fine Day last year, I said that that film felt novelistic to me, and I tried to explain what I meant. La Chimera doesn’t feel like a novel; it feels like a poem, and I want to try to explain—to myself, first of all—what I mean by that, too. The film has an extraordinary density, part of which comes from the richness of its allusions, to other films but also to myth and fairy tale, to opera and literature; watching it one has the sense (I have the sense) that for every caught resonance there are nine or ten that have escaped. But more than this I think the film’s density comes from the way images and motifs are repeated, interrogated and transformed, with such obsessiveness that they become structural; much of the film’s emotional charge comes from these points of return. Take the film’s final scene, for instance, or the moments just before the final scene: Arthur, working now with the rival gang of tombolari, is dowsing for artifacts on the grounds of what seems to be an abandoned construction site. There’s nothing here, he says, at which point the leader of the gang calls over a young man, a foreigner, who pulls from his pocket small gold pieces he has found there. Arthur takes one in his fingers: a golden sun, it’s called. Narrating it in this way can’t convey how moving it is, to feel the film reach back to its very first moment, when we saw Beniamina’s tattoo and then the sun through branches. (The sun is following us, have you noticed?) Carolyn Forché, one of my first poetry teachers, once described the nature of a poem by means of an image I’ve never forgotten. Imagine a spider web, she told us, and imagine that all over it are hung tiny bells. Touch the web anywhere, and all the bells everywhere will ring. That’s what Rohrwacher’s film felt like to me, like a supersensitive surface mined with emotion, each moment chiming with another, or with several others.
And the film is like a poem in another way, too, in its investment in lyric space, in spaces removed from time. That’s what the tombs are, the wonder they elicit, to which even the most monetarily motivated of Arthur’s tombolari are not immune. (My God, they repeat, awed and disarmed, if only for a moment, by their first sight of the goddess in the dark.) I’ve already mentioned what was for me the film’s moment of deepest wonder, just after Italia is chased away from the tomb raiders’ latest find. They uncover the entrance of a tomb, the seal of which is intact: it has never been pillaged before. One of them takes a crowbar and starts striking, trying to open it. This is when the POV shifts: suddenly we are in the tomb, amid beautiful, small animal figurines barely visible in the dark. The silence is just faintly disturbed by the sound of the crowbar; the sound grows louder, the tomb is breached; air that has been still for two thousand years is disturbed. And in one of the most beautiful effects I’ve ever seen, we watch as the frescos on the walls oxidize and fade. It’s a gorgeous moment, absolutely rooted in the narrative of the film, and in its emotional logic; it’s also an homage to, almost a quotation from, Fellini’s Roma.
This scene finds an echo at the film’s end. Arthur does find something at that worksite, after the young man shows him his golden suns; here, he says, pointing to a puddle where he’s reflected, inverted—another ring on the bell of the inverted man motif. They bring in a bulldozer; when the entrance is exposed, they insist Arthur go in first. Just before he does, reluctantly, he notices a mourning dove on a beam above him, sending us back to the film’s first seconds, when we heard the bird’s cry; magically, we then see him from above, from the dove’s perspective. (The film isn’t just torn between underground and surface; it’s fascinated by flight, too.) Just after he descends, the entrance collapses behind him. We hear him panting in the dark; then he lights his candle (a wonderful touch, that always he has his stub of a candle, eschewing the flashlights the other men use). He has a final outburst of violence, striking himself on the forehead, in terror and frustration. Then he continues forward, his expression changing to one of wonder as he enters the chamber. We follow him, seeing nothing but his face—no artifacts, no geological features—until he comes to a strand of red yarn dangling from above: Ariadne’s thread, finally found. He begins to pull it, and a hole seems to open above him, allowing daylight to strike his face; then we cut to Beniamina, pulling the yarn urgently from above. It snaps; she sighs in frustration; then we see Arthur’s hand on her arm.
I said before that Arthur’s choice is between an orientation toward life or an orientation toward death. The wonder of this film is not just that it refrains from judging the choice he makes—as morbid, as unhealthy; but that it allows it to lead him to such overwhelming joy.
As always, thank you for reading—
G.
I’m thrilled they released your version of What Belongs to You! I have listened to the other actors version - it was okay... I’ve listened to your Cleanness audiobook several times, and you have a certain sensitivity and rhythm that only comes from an intimate understanding of the text. Can’t wait to read (and then subsequently listen to) Small Rain!
I love how you point out how the film encompasses so many genres at once. I was struck by the alignment in the boat scenes to Titanic - with the flashes of the engine room, and the moment he flings the head of the statue into the water. Because what else would you do with a priceless artifact that has driven the plot while standing on the edge of a ship? Beautiful movie, thank you for the suggestion!