La Chimera not a poorly made film – on the contrary, it’s quite beautifully crafted and gorgeous to look at. But its pleasantness is lulling.
settles itself in an area of Italy that feels vastly out of time; thematically, temporally, and geographically linked to her past two featuresVenturing outward from the bucolic village where Arthur and his jovial gang of grave-robbers reside – their modern clothes offset by the outwardly old-world elders and architecture they’re surrounded by – to an outdoor bar for drinking and dancing, it’s suddenly difficult to parse exactly in what decade the film takes place.
Emerging from an undisclosed stint in jail, Englishman Arthur reluctantly rejoins with the Italian tombaroli who inadvertently put him there: a ragtag gaggle of misfits and scoundrels who illegally dig up the Etruscan treasures buried with their dead to be sold through fences to third-party collectors and museums. The young man has a clairvoyant gift for scouting where artifacts lie hidden under the earth, using a twig as a divining rod to guide his instincts.
Arthur is a stoic, brooding man who flies into brief fits of volatility, though it’s a somewhat flat and sedate performance for the usually more exciting Josh O’Connor. But Arthur’s shared grief for Beniamina knits his heart closely to Flora’s, the only character of the film who seems to receive Arthur’s pure, untainted affection, aside from the slightly less unblemished interests in Italia.
For me, the most difficult films to write on are the ones that don’t elicit any emotion at all, either positive or negative, andqualifies. It’s not by any means a bad or poorly made film – on the contrary, it’s quite beautifully crafted and gorgeous to look at, with its playful camerawork credited to Hélène Louvart. But I found myself lulled into emotionally mute sedation by its relatively meager pleasantness.
sed in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called
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