Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera explores materialism and memory
🎭 O’Connor performs grief as physical geometry: hunched shoulders, a sideways walk, eyes that look past people to somewhere else. When he plays his flute for the dead, you feel the threshold between laughter and tears. La Chimera
Perhaps the Chimera is not a monster to be slain, but a part of us—the part that insists there is something else beneath the surface. Whether you come to La Chimera for Josh O’Connor’s raw performance, the breathtaking cinematography, or the haunting score by Apparat, you will leave with dirt under your fingernails and a tear in your eye. Whether you come to La Chimera for Josh
The narrative centers on Arthur (played with a melancholic, rumpled brilliance by Josh O’Connor), a British archaeologist recently released from an Italian prison. Dressed in a perpetually soiled white linen suit, Arthur is a man untethered from time. He possesses a supernatural, dowsing-rod-like ability to sense the voids in the earth where ancient tombs lie hidden. He possesses a supernatural
'La Chimera' Review: Unearthing the Buried Past in Italy - WSJ
The most transcendent sequence comes at the end, so I will not spoil it. But I will say this: Rohrwacher builds to a climax that involves a train station, a pile of mismatched luggage, and a crowd of mute, staring figures. It is the most literal depiction of the afterlife I have seen in years—not as a heaven or hell, but as a waiting room. And Arthur, finally, gets to board his train.
The film explores the tension between the sacred past and the commodified present. A central scene depicts a pristine tomb being opened, only for the ancient frescos to fade instantly upon contact with modern air—a metaphor for how the past cannot truly be returned to, only "fetishized".