Another film from celebrated writer-director Alice Rohrwacher, La Chimera is best, or most pithily described, as a dour look at the realities of tomb raiding. People seek their fortunes in nefarious ways, but that fortune isn't necessarily the key to happiness.
Josh O'Connor plays Arthur, a young man who has spent some time in prison for his crimes. The thing he remains best at is also the thing that could ruin his life, but that's less of a concern since the disappearance of a woman he loved, Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello). Can he turn his life around? Will he go back to his old ways? Will viewers care?
This film has received a lot of love, which makes my dissenting opinion fairly irrelevant, but I was not a fan. One part did work for me, a potential relationship between Arthur and a young woman named Italia (Carol Duarte), and it's always good to see Isabella Rossellini in a role, however small, but I spent a lot of the 130-minute runtime wishing it would all be over sooner.
I know that others will get more from it though. It does have things to say - about love, loss, language, and the cost of spending so much time dealing with the dead. I just didn't appreciate the way the message was conveyed. While sold as a slice of magical realism, it feels neither magical nor realistic enough, and it's not helped by the fact that the lead character is almost impossible to warm to.
I have seen O'Connor do good work elsewhere recently, but this is not a role he shines in. The language barrier separates him from everyone else, but so does his apparent urge to stay away from any real connection with the live people around him. Duarte does better, helped by the fact that she seems to have a heart and soul, and there are decent turns from Rossellini, Alba (sister of Alice) Rohrwacher, and Lou Roy-Lecollinet. Few others feel worth watching though, and this is a film that makes use of a fairly large cast in some sequences.
Maybe something has been lost in translation (Rohrwacher had some help on the screenplay from Carmela Covino and Marco Pettenello), particularly when it comes to the attempts to intertwine some lightness through the dark, but while it's easy for me to see how others may like it more than I did . . . it's hard for me to see why it has received so much love. Rohrwacher has done much better with some of her previous work, and I recommend exploring her filmography (particularly The Wonders), but this ended up being disappointingly average, at best. I happily await the many people who can come along to tell me why I am completely wrong.
5/10
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