La Chimera (dir. Alice Rohrwacher)

Written by Tom Augustine.

For my money, the Italian Film Festival is the best of Aotearoa’s many cultural film festivals. That’s not to disparage the wonderful work of the many other festivals in the mix — I am somewhat biased by the fact that Italian cinema is probably my favourite national cinema of anywhere in the world. The Italian Film Festival, with its consistently high standard of programming and wonderfully festive, convivial atmosphere, is the grand ideal of a cultural cinema event, and it looks like this year’s lineup will continue that tradition, with a number of new works and some genuine classics all-but demanding a trip to the local movie-house. 

I recently tried to pin down what it was about Italian cinema that speaks to me so profoundly. I think it’s not just the richness of the culture on display, but the way their cinema so often intermingles the spiritual with the landscape, and the regular people who populate that space. Italian neorealism, one of the most significant postwar cinematic movements, is but one arm of the rich history of the country’s filmmaking, which has also made space for filmmakers as varied as Vittorio DeSica, Roberto Rossellini, Pasolini, Leone, Bertolucci, Antonioni, Visconti, Bava, De Seta; the list goes on (many of whom had their start in neorealism, and yet all of whom are profoundly different from each other). Federico Fellini, the ultimate maestro of Italian cinema, is a movement unto himself — he blended so effortlessly those twin Italian fascinations of the spiritual, dreamlike capabilities of cinema and the vivid depictions of everyday people (as well as the occasional high-powered director, of course). Alice Rohrwacher, comfortably the best working Italian filmmaker today, is the clear heir to Fellini in both style and substance, effortlessly weaving the mystical with the regular in a way that makes the phrase ‘magical realism’ seem hopelessly inadequate. With features The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro, series My Brilliant Friend, and the gorgeous short Le Pupille, Rohrwacher has established a style all her own, but one that feels like a natural evolution from the greats that came before her.

La Chimera, one of the best films of the 2020s so far, announced a new level of awareness of Rohrwacher in the art cinema world. The auteur has never been more confident, more accessible and yet deeply in tune with the poetic potentialities of her material. Screening on Rialto Channel alongside other great recent Italian films To Chiara, The Eight Mountains and box-office giant There’s Still Tomorrow, in support of the Italian Film Festival’s strong 2025 programme, audiences can explore a compelling cross-section of where Italian cinema stands today, with La Chimera serving as the crown jewel. Josh O’Connor, on the cusp of the stardom that another Italian auteur, Luca Guadagnino, would afford him with Challengers, is here Rohrwacher’s besuited muse as Arthur, a taciturn and grief-shrouded tomb raider quite unlike any you’ve encountered before. An Englishman in rural Italy, he works with a small band of kooks to rob Etruscan graves littered around the countryside, fencing the wares they locate to survive. Arthur is grieving the loss of his ex-girlfriend, Beniamina, and reconnects with her mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini) and her maid Italia (Carol Duarte). It becomes clear that Arthur’s talent for, and need to, raid these sites is not drawn from a mercenary desire, but something deeper and more unknowable. This is the divine construction of La Chimera — the sense of some simmering pseudo-magical fabric just below the surface, unseen, but tied so intrinsically to the real, earthen locations and people of the film that they become utterly inseparable from each other. 

This month to celebrate the launch of the 2025 iteration of the Italian Film Festival, Rialto Channel is screening four modern classics of cinema from the region. Among them is Alice Rohrwacher’s remarkable, Fellini-esque story of a merry band of tomb raiders, led by a haunting, gorgeous performance from Josh O’Connor.

Rohrwacher has employed both 35mm and 16mm film here, resulting in a gorgeous, grainy texture that makes La Chimera itself feel like it has been dug up from some ancient hidden place. The way sunlight threads through the images of La Chimera should be studied: it feels as though Rohrwacher has connected to something ethereal and rarely captured on screen. Much like with her last great film, Happy as Lazzaro, there’s an outside-of-time sensibility that contrasts with the imposition of industrial space. The lost souls that wander Rohrwacher’s films feel dropped into our world from somewhere else, and yet, who hasn’t felt adrift in the mechanised morass of the now? Rohrwacher somehow makes this all feel rooted in realism — none of it feels cartoonish, winking or ironic. The presence of a protagonist clad in an ever-dirtier cream-coloured suit doesn’t feel like a directorial indulgence, but an essential cog in a magnificent clock. In the age of the ‘Instagram Face’, so-called, Rohrwacher’s talent for finding unique and fascinating visages is unparalleled: each of Arthur’s companions could fuel a fascinating Youtube rabbit hole, so complete are their personas and yet so different from what we’ve come to expect from modern cinema.   

At its heart, La Chimera is a meditation on the unknowability of death, and the way grief is itself a kind of channel to the great beyond. The outlandish idea of modern-day tomb raiders is here given great, urgent meaning — these buried, unseen landscapes are monuments to memories of people themselves long-lost. The messy, warping scars of grief, how it manages to turn time and consciousness into something elastic, is the mood La Chimera so exquisitely attunes to. It all culminates in a final ten minutes of rapturous beauty and sadness, some of the most moving modern cinema that there is. As much as I adored La Chimera when I first saw it, I loved it all the more upon returning and excavating it once more. It’s a film that, like the central bust that is so significant to La Chimera’s plot, makes us feel like we are bearing witness to something rarified, even forbidden.

La Chimera  premieres on April 28 at 8:30 PM on Rialto Channel (Sky, Channel 39)

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE TRAILER