It is a film about the weight of history—not just the history in textbooks, but the history in the soil, in our bones, and in our hearts. Alice Rohrwacher has crafted a eulogy for the living and a love letter to the dead. It asks us to consider our own Chimeras: What impossible thing are we searching for? And what happens if we actually find it?
In Greek myth, the Chimera was a fire-breathing monster—a hybrid of lion, goat, and serpent. To chase the chimera came to mean pursuing an impossible dream, a fantasy that could never be caught. Rohrwacher’s film plays beautifully with this double meaning. On one level, the “chimeras” are the illicit Etruscan artifacts the tombaroli sell on the black market: beautiful, stolen fragments of a lost world. On another, deeper level, the chimera is Arthur’s lost love, Beniamina. She is gone. He knows this rationally. But his entire being refuses to accept it.
Upon its premiere at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, La Chimera was met with widespread critical acclaim. Josh O’Connor’s performance as the tormented Arthur was singled out as "exquisite" and "revelatory," with critics praising his ability to blend grit with transcendence. The film currently holds a high rating on review aggregators and has been lauded as another enchanting modern myth from one of cinema's most distinctive contemporary voices. While some critics noted the film is "light on plot" and more of a wandering, picaresque journey, this was often seen as a strength, allowing the audience to become fully immersed in its unique, poetic atmosphere.
Rohrwacher favors long, deliberate takes, naturalistic performances, and a near-poetic visual language. The cinematography (by Hélène Louvart) bathes ruins, fields, and interiors in a warm, tactile light, making the physical landscape feel like another character. The pacing is meditative, allowing small gestures and textures to accrue emotional weight. Rohrwacher’s direction balances realism with a faintly surreal or fable-like tone, creating an atmosphere that’s at once intimate and mythic. La Chimera
Whether encountering La Chimera as an Etruscan statue unearthed in an indie film, a historical witch trial in a classic Italian novel, or an ancient mythological beast, the keyword remains remarkably unified in its intent. It warns us of the dangers of looking so intensely at what is gone, or what might be, that we lose our footing in the present world.
A former opera singer, Flora embodies the aristocratic, fading glamour of the past. Her relationship with Italia and her longing for her daughter, Beniamina, add a layer of tragic nostalgia to the story. 5. Visual Style and Production
DP Hélène Louvart AFC mixed 35mm and 16mm formats and aspect… It is a film about the weight of
The film opens with Arthur stumbling off a train, disheveled, wearing a mismatched white linen suit that looks like it was stolen from a dead poet. He has just been released from prison. He returns to a makeshift commune of eccentric grave robbers led by the wonderfully brash Italia (Carol Duarte). They are a chorus of comic incompetence—men who use a bent stick to find tombs and celebrate a single intact vase like it’s the World Cup. They are scavengers, yes, but Rohrwacher grants them a strange, shabby dignity. They are not villains. They are peasants trying to claw a living from a land that has stopped yielding crops, so they harvest the dead instead.
La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher, Josh O’Connor, Etruscan, tomb raiders, film review, streaming, mythology, 2023 film, Italian cinema.
This informative paper explores La Chimera (2023), the critically acclaimed film by Italian director Alice Rohrwacher And what happens if we actually find it
In Campana's work, the Chimera represents a vanishing, nocturnal beauty—an elusive ideal of art and femininity that the poet seeks but can never grasp.
At its core, La Chimera is a modern retelling of the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Arthur, like Orpheus, is a musician of sorts—an archaeologist whose true instrument is his divining rod—who descends into the underworld (the Etruscan tombs) in a desperate attempt to retrieve his lost love. The film constantly blurs the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead. The tombaroli are not merely criminals; they are intermediaries, violently breaking into the resting places of the dead to bring their treasures into the light of the modern world. Rohrwacher suggests that history is never truly buried; it is a living, breathing entity that coexists with the present, and the film questions how we bear the weight of the past while living in the now.
La Chimera remains one of the most intriguing creatures of ancient mythology, a symbol of power, strength, and the fusion of different animal traits. Its legend has endured for centuries, inspiring artistic and literary works, and continues to fascinate people to this day. As a representation of the complexities and contradictions of human nature, La Chimera remains a timeless and captivating figure, an embodiment of both the beauty and the terror of the mythological world.
🌿 Without giving away the ending: the film closes on a vertical line—up or down, sky or soil, life or death. And in that choice, Rohrwacher suggests that the only real chimera might be the belief that we can ever go back.
At its core, La Chimera explores the tension between history as a sacred legacy and history as a capitalist resource. Arthur is the linchpin of a group of tombaroli (grave robbers) who loot tombs to sell artifacts on the black market to a shadowy dealer known as Spartaco. While the tombaroli see these treasures as a way to escape their gritty, impoverished reality, the film suggests a deeper moral transgression.