Reverence and Retribution in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera by Alicia Steinmann

Spoilers ahead for La Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher

I saw La Chimera, directed by Alice Rohrwacher, on a scalding July day in 2024. I was grateful for the air conditioning in the IFC theater, where I sat for 2 hours, transported to 1980s Northern Italy. The other times I’ve seen media related to that time and place are when I watch Call Me By Your Name every few months. Elio and Oliver’s idyllic summer fantasy soothes in me what the New York winter chill disrupts. La Chimera is, in all truth, not idyllic. Rohrwacher presents the parts of Italy that are still beautiful, but simultaneously rural, dark, and impoverished. 

Italy has a complex history (which I don't have the time or space here to try to explain in full). However, I do want to address the stereotypes of crime in Italy. Mafia often comes up in conversation related to this. It’s important to note that the Mafia came out of the government’s lack of care for certain groups of people. Northern and Southern Italy have long been marked by economic differences. Northerners benefited from trade and the influx of industry during the Renaissance- the South did not. Rather, Arabs, Germans, Spaniards, Frenchies, and countless others at one point or another all took their turns colonizing the South. Thus, the South consistently suffered from inconsistent governments and economies. This is when the Mafia and organized crime came out, as a response to numerous occupations that rarely benefited Southerners. The North did not have this same issue. Because of this difference, Sam Migliore notes that Southerners “regard treasure hunting as an acceptable way of improving their financial status; they do not identify treasure hunters as criminals” (162).

Meanwhile, Rohrwacher's Umbria does not share the same sentiment. In fact, when we meet Arthur (Josh O’Connor), he’s just come back from a stint in prison for his grave-robbing activities. I bring this up because, in La Chimera, there exists organized crime that we might not typically associate with the North, when our depictions of that region in films are Call Me By Your Name and Letters to Juliet. Rohrwacher dismantles our preconceived notions of what Northern Italy “should” be like, and instead offers a portrait that’s true to the world at large and true to this film; people risk their lives and morals in pursuit of economic prosperity, all while the rich benefit from their dirty work. 

What’s less true to life are the brief yet shining moments of magic that Rohrwacher integrates into her story. She quickly introduces us to Beniamina, Arthur's girlfriend, who we later discover has passed away through frames of her in his dreams. A red thread from her dress follows him and starts to permeate Arthur outside of his dreamscape. He encounters that thread until the very last frame, and it becomes an indicator that he has joined Beniamina in the afterlife. Moreover, Arthur and his band of friends (known in the film through song as the tombaroli) find their Etruscan treasures because of Arthur’s “gift”. Using a dowsing stick (pictured below) and through some kind of divining force, Arthur can feel where the tombs are under the ground. Arthur’s connection to the underworld, the home of the dead, is what separates him from all others. Rohrwacher herself notes that, in the face of a“ generation [...] that feels as if it’s not linked to the past, that feels different, that no longer believes in the sacred,” she “decided to write this film that also talks about our relationship with the world of death.” She merges parts of Italy’s sprawling history, from the Etruscans (BCE) to the industrial boom of the 1980s, to emphasize that this current generation, as we are, is not reverential. That, as capitalism and commercialization have become commonplace, we’ve lost our connection to the past and have started looting it rather than learning from it.

Arthur isn’t reverential at first either. With a little convincing, he’s back to his ways, stealing and swindling. It’s only during a party on the beach, hosted to open a brand-new power station, that the tombaroli discover an untouched Etruscan altar. A statue of Cybele, also known as “Magna Mater", meaning ‘great mother. Throughout ancient Western history, Cybele remained a cornerstone of mythology. She was the goddess of nature, animals, fertility, and a protector of cities. Her statue, a person frozen in time, reminds Arthur that they are looting a temple that was built to protect. He becomes erratic when the others break the head off the statue in a rush to beat the cops chasing after them. They never realize that the supposed ‘police’ are actually their rival tombaroli, who ultimately loot the rest of the cave for all its worth and bring the bounty to Spartaco, the area's black-market artifacts dealer.

With Cybele’s head in tow, and the help of Spartaco’s niece, Melodie, the tombaroli travel to Spartaco’s yacht, where she’s auctioning off the headless Cybele. The tombaroli bring Spartaco the head and try to bargain with it, but in a moment of stark realization, Arthur grabs it and throws it overboard, lost to the ocean forever. Before doing so, he admires Cybele’s face, telling her, “non sei fatta per gli occhi degli uomini” (‘you are not made for the eyes of men’).

The film is full of chimeras, illusions, and fantasies of what the world could be. Here, Arthur shatters the chimera that he could ever continue to rob tombs without suffering the moral consequences. Though he does the ‘right’ thing by throwing Cybele’s head overboard, his past crimes come back to haunt him. His tombaroli, furious at him for squandering their opportunity to make real money with Cybele, desert him. On the train back to their rural community, Arthur hallucinates characters we met at the very beginning of the film, speaking to him about items he’s stolen. The conductor asks, “You don’t know what happened to my grave goods? [...] There was a painted askos [ancient Greek pot], and two grey ceramic ollas [small, rounded jar], a large one and a smaller one, there was also a golden fibula [brooch], it was pinned here [points to his chest]. It meant a lot to me, so I thought maybe…” Arthur can’t escape the hundreds of stolen artifacts he’s profited from, and they come back to haunt him, just as Beneimina’s red thread does. 

Perhaps another dissolving chimera is the idea that Arthur could ever live, and live happily, without Beniamina. We don’t know when she died, but it seems recent enough that her mother, Flora (played by Isabella Rossellini), still believes she’ll come home soon. Yet, from the first frame, we watch Arthur’s connection to Beniamina grow stronger, and his connection to the living world lessens. He does have a ‘secret connection’ with Flora’s housekeeper, Italia. Ultimately, it doesn’t change him in any way, other than a shared kiss with her being the last bit of human intimacy he experiences before he dies. Arthur, from the moment we meet him, seems destined to be unhappy, so long as he's separated from Beniamina.  

For the women of this story, however, this is different. While Italia worked for Flora, she secretly hid her kids in the house, as they had nowhere else to live. However, once Flora discovers her, she and a group of women and children start squatting in an abandoned train station nearby. They turn it into a beautiful living space, revitalizing the once-bustling transport building. Even the only female tombarolo, Fabiana, decides to join the women’s commune there. She was sick of being told what to do by the gaggle of male tombaroli. Here, Rohrwacher brings patriarchy into conversation. As she notes, “I was more interested in looking at how tragic patriarchy is for men themselves. I don’t think it’s good for men, and I don’t think it’s good for women.” The differences in how women find community with each other, versus the male tomberoli dropping Arthur once he proved worthless to them, emphasize this discrepancy.  Italia even extends the community she’s found with the women to Arthur, telling him he could join their commune. However, he leaves her in the middle of the night, knowing he’s out of place, both there and in the living world. 

In the first frame of the film, we see Beniamina hiding from the lens. We hear Arthur, the camera is his POV, saying, “So it’s you?” She replies, “Eh?” “My last woman’s face”, he ends. From then on, La Chimera tracks his descent into the afterlife, which he seems conscious of as well. His tomb-robbing only leads him further into the past, into antiquity, and into the world of the dead that the tombs hide. The story sometimes feels hopeless- lost friendship, unending poverty, and the corruption of the rich over the poor. But it’s all a journey to reunite with the woman he loves, and he’s victorious. In this respect, it is anything but hopeless.