This Italian fable features a magical movie ending : NPR

Carol Duarte and Josh O’Connor in The Chimera.

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Carol Duarte and Josh O’Connor in The Chimera.

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The wonderful 42-year-old filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher practices a genre of cinema that I have come to think of as “Italian magical neorealism.” She gives us portraits of difficult lives in poor rural communities, but they are adorned with a sense of fanciful, almost fable-like enchantment.

Rohrwacher’s 2014 film, Wonders, was a lyrical drama about a family of Tuscan beekeepers. She followed this in 2018 with Happy like Lazzaroabout a group of sharecroppers on a tobacco farm whose story moves from picaresque comedy to painful tragedy.

His wonderful new film, The Chimera, follows much the same vein, with one key difference. While Rohrwacher has typically worked with non-professional Italian actors, this time she chose English actor Josh O’Connor, best known for his Emmy Award-winning performance as the young Prince Charles in The crown.

But O’Connor’s character here doesn’t give off any whiff of royalty, even though his name East Arthur. When we first meet him, he’s sleeping on a train bound for his old stomping grounds in Tuscany. He has just been released from prison after serving time for the crime of grave robbing.

Arthur possesses a mysterious talent as an archaeologist: wielding a magic wand, he can detect the presence of buried objects, many of which date back to the Etruscan civilization more than 2,000 years ago. Arthur works with a group of tombarolior grave robbers, who rely on him to know where to dig.

On his return, many of these old friends welcome him back with a parade — one of many moments in which Rohrwacher briefly channels the vibrant human chaos of a Fellini film. Arthur is a little reluctant to rejoin his old gang, since they let him take over after their last job. But he doesn’t seem to have anything else to do, or anywhere to go. He may be a foreigner – his Italian is decent but far from perfect – but it’s the only place in the world where you feel a bit like home. And O’Connor plays him with such a deep sense of melancholy that it almost seems special when his handsome, concerned face turns into a warm smile.

It’s not immediately clear what Arthur wants; unlike his henchmen, he doesn’t really seem interested in making money from their loot. The answer lies in his dreams, haunted by a beautiful young woman named Beniamina, the love of his life, whom he lost in unclear circumstances.

Thus, Arthur’s determination to go underground becomes a metaphor for his longing for an irremediable past: Beniamina is the Eurydice to his Orpheus, and he desperately wants her to return.

Arthur is still close to Beniamina’s mother, Flora, played with a wonderful mix of warmth and imperiousness by the great Isabella Rossellini. His presence here made me think of his filmmaker father, the neorealist titan Roberto Rossellini – a fitting association for a film about how the past forever seeps into the present.

One of the pleasures of Rohrwacher’s cinema is the way she subtly blurs our sense of time. The Chimera takes place in the 1980s, but it could take place 20 years earlier or 20 years later. Rohrwacher and his brilliant cinematographer, Hélène Louvart, shot the film on a mixture of film stocks and occasionally altered the image in ways that evoke cinematic antiques from the silent era. As sad as Arthur’s journey is, there’s a playful sensibility to Rohrwacher’s sensibility that never ceases to draw you in, inviting you to lose yourself in the film’s mysteries.

One of the most important characters in the story is Italia, played by Brazilian actress Carol Duarte, who works in Flora’s house. Italia is a bit of an odd duck with an appealing frankness, and she could be the one to get Arthur out of his funk and get him to stop living in the past.

I won’t reveal what’s going on except to say this The Chimera builds not one but two thrilling scenes of subterranean exploration, in which Arthur must finally discover his life’s purpose – not by using a magic wand, but by following his heart. And that leads to the most magical ending of the film I’ve seen in a while, and also the most real.