La Chimera film review — a mischievous tale of Tuscan tomb raiders

In the age of Netflix, we expect to be told ahead of time exactly what we’re watching. (Genre, mood, our pending emotional response.) Rare is the film that instead takes the time to show us these things. Or which, to borrow an image from excellent new curio La Chimera, invites us to look at it as an archaeologist might: by holding it up to the light and asking what we have in our hands.

The comparison comes to mind watching Alice Rohrwacher’s rich and mischievous Italian comic drama. Set in 1980s Tuscany, it concerns a ragtag band of tombaroli: tomb raiders who break into Etruscan vaults to steal artefacts once buried with the dead. Chief among the crooks is Arthur, a scruffy English expat played by Josh O’Connor. The film can be heisty, larky and madcap. It also comes wrapped up with metaphysics, economics and grief.

The sense of excavation doesn’t end with the plot. Amid the strange alchemy of film stock, costumes and tone, the film itself feels as if it might have been found in the projection booth of a small-town Italian cinema, last open in 1985. The tell-tale modern detail, of course, is O’Connor, an actor enjoying much fame in the here and now. But even he is soon part of the heady period atmosphere, dressed in a shabby cream suit, a puzzle on the surface and deeper down too.

The tension between character and actor is fascinating. O’Connor’s boyishness is enough for those around Arthur to take him for charming. But something else is always at work, his scowl at odds with his screwball colleagues. Rohrwacher has a great eye for actors’ faces. She also puts pointedly playful quote marks around her story. Scenes are sped into slapstick, the fourth wall gleefully broken.

Yet what the film leaves us with is anything but frivolous. Instead, it asks complex questions about performance and the past — and reminds us that we never know what’s coming next. Quite a feat for a movie so bound up with the dead. 

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from May 10