Oct 23

Oct 23 Alice Rohrwacher’s "La Chimera"

Movie Review by Dennis D. McDonald

A young archaeologist, recently released from prison and destitute after being caught trafficking in Italy’s Tuscan archaeological treasures, returns to his seaside hometown. There, he reconnects with his old gang of ne’er-do-wells. Before long, he’s back to using his peculiar “gift” for a new illegal job—his uncanny, almost psychic ability to locate and unearth buried artifacts. It’s the same talent that got him imprisoned in the first place. But this “one last job” promises to be a big one, and he can’t resist.

Of course, there’s also a girl. She’s a student who supports herself and her family by caring for, and taking music lessons from, an elderly woman in a wheelchair—played by Isabella Rossellini—who constantly fends off her daughters’ efforts to move her out of her decaying old mansion and into something more “suitable.”

These storylines intertwine in an almost magical way. Everyone seems to be playing an angle. They don’t just want to survive; they’re all grasping for that elusive brass ring of success that continually slips out of reach for those living on society’s fringes. Their encounters with money and power are rarely pleasant and never successful. Yet somehow, they endure and keep moving forward despite repeated setbacks.

Such themes are nothing new in cinema; they hark back to the days of Charlie Chaplin and the silent films where members of the underclass scraped by and only occasionally managed to “make good.”

La Chimera embraces these timeless ideas, but what makes it distinctive is its vivid sense of time and place. Its large cast of well-drawn, often quirky characters somehow persists despite their often disastrous brushes with conventional society and its harsh, unforgiving rules.

Is this a “feel-good” movie? That’s probably not the right question to ask. It’s different. Parts are silly, parts are sentimental, and parts are pure magic. It’s a story about people we may never meet but instantly recognize. Perhaps that’s because so many of us are still chasing that same fleeting brass ring that always seems just out of reach.