La chimera: Alice Rohrwacher’s set in Tuscany and Lazio. The Orphic boundary between the sacrosanct and the violable
CANNES – Alice Rohrwacher’s new film, La Chimera, is in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. It is set in the shady world of the notorious “tombaroli” of the 1980s who loot Etruscan tombs to sell the artefacts they find to local black-market fences. (See all the locations of La Chimera HERE). As in her previous films, nature plays a key role, becoming a bonafide character that the director focuses on with special attention, both in narration and framing: “The relationship with nature is central to my life and is central to this film. The relationship with the invisible, equally as important as the relationship with that which is seen.” A film that evokes the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice to examine the past and the present, the hereafter and the here-and-now, the above and the below, the things that must be kept unseen, not intended for the eyes of men. The boundary between the violable and the sacrosanct that is crossed.
She does this through the story of a young English archaeologist (Josh O'Connor), the 'foreigner’ who lives outside the city walls, neither in nor out, on a spiritual search for his lost beloved, while involved in the miserably human black-market traffic of archaeological artefacts looted by a ragtag gang of tomb raiders (tombaroli) who have chosen him as their guide, given his gift for “sensing the emptiness’: “As a child, we would hear the stories of tombaroli in our area – says the director. What always fascinated me most was not so much that they were violating the law of the day, of the living, but that they were violating the law of the night, of the dead. That always concerned me. I wondered how these people could feel authorized to break, steal, take objects filled with historical meaning. It happens because they don’t know the value of these things, these men are detached from their past. They are not the children of their fathers who grew up alongside those ancient tombs without ever violating them. They are the children of themselves. They own the world: they can enter into places that are considered off limits, break vases, disturb votive offerings, trade in them. They see them simply as old things, junk. They are no longer sacred objects”.
The locations of Alice Rohrwacher’s new film
Shooting began in early 2022 in various places in Tuscia, starting with Tarquinia where many locations provided a large number of sets, including Piazza della Tribuna and the cliff below Santa Maria in Castello. There was a week’s shoot in Civitavecchia, on the Frasca beach and in Torre Valdaliga Nord, beneath the power station, with the industrial area used for scenes with vintage cars. Several municipalities in the province of Viterbo also provided locations, including the village of Blera, settled between 8th and 7thcenturies B.C.E., the era of the numerous necropolises that make the area so famous.
La chimera also used locations in several places in Southern Tuscany, in particular the municipality and borgo of Montalcino. Scenes were also shot on the old Asciano-Monte Antico railway track, known as the Val d’Orcia train, in the hamlets of Monte Amiata Scalo and Torrenieri, where the opening scene, Arthur returns to his tombaroli friends after being arrested by the police, was filmed.
Green Set with EcoMuvi
The film was produced by Cresto-Dina for tempesta with Rai Cinema, in coproduction with Amka Films Productions (Switzerland) and Ad Vitam Production (France) in collaboration with Arte France Cinema. The set followed EcoMuvi, the European protocol for environmental sustainability certified for audio-visual productions. Like other protocols for sustainable audio-visual production, EcoMuvi is a rethinking of the process providing guidelines for analysing the environmental impact of a production and reduce it, not only by compensating but also by taking a respectful and parsimonious approach and making intelligent use of resources.
Josh O'Connor in the cast of 'La chimera'
A chimera is something that everyone chases, tries to grasp hold of, but never manages to achieve. For the tombaroli it is the dream of easy money, that accursed need for wealth that afflicts humanity; for Arthur (Josh O'Connor) it is the search for the beloved he has lost. A spirit different to the others, he is sensitive in a group of men “being men”, searching for more. He is a man without roots in search of roots. “As much as you invest in getting your hands dirty, in being an outlaw, you’ll always be what you are” he is told in the film. “I used the character to represent nostalgia itself, he feels empty because his life has been emptied of his love, he is the personification of nostalgia par excellence. But I don’t feel nostalgic, the director notes, I didn’t create him out of the desire to go backwards but to look at the past with a living relationship”. The cast includes Isabella Rossellini, Carol Duarte, Alba Rohrwacher and Vincenzo Nemolato.
The importance of stories
La chimera is also a film about storytelling, about believing in stories. Mythological traditions often reference a door to the hereafter. The character played by Isabella Rossellini, mother of Beniamina, strongly believes in its existence and her belief makes it real, fascinating Arthur and setting him off in search of it. “I wanted to show a mystical reality, but in a very human way. There’s always irony, humour in the film, a sense of the ridiculous, of treating the characters gently. It was important to include some comedy in the tragedy. At the heart of it they are all characters from a fairy tale.”
The “new world” built by Italia
There is a little place of hope in the film, in how Italia (Carol Duarte) builds her world. An imperfect microcosm, where too many people live together and the children have lice, but one with “a different approach, all female, in the rebuilding; it’s not just about taking things but giving them a new life”.
Alice Rohrwacher: I wanted to make a film freely
“Cinema must be liberating, it has no tethers, it must be unfettered. In this moment, full of limitations imposed on stories, often by the new distribution platforms, I wanted to make a film that was free. This is why I imagined such a local story, but calling upon international actors. I felt the need for the foreigner’s gaze. Italy is the country of foreigners par excellence, where arrivals and departures have stratified. I also wanted to pay tribute to the Grand Tour, to the fascination that men from northern Europe felt for the Mediterranean”.
"My chimera?" asks the director: “The awareness of the wonderful place where we live, this paradise that we endlessly try to reduce to a horror zone. For me, the chimera is to manage to experience it for the paradise it is. On the professional front, meanwhile, it’s the desire to reach something that is always unattainable with my films. To examine humanity, and what unites us, beyond our differences.”
For La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher worked with long-time collaborators: director of photography Hélène Louvart, editor Nelly Quettier, set designer Emita Frigato, costume designer Loredana Buscemi and line producer Giorgio Gasparini. Casting by Chiara Polizzi and Fiona Weir. The project was supported by Swiss Television RSI SSR SRG in Switzerland and by the Cinéma du Monde del CNC fund in France.
La Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher: story
Each one of us chases a chimera, never managing to grasp it. For some it is the dream of easy money, for others the search for an idealized love … Returning to a small town on the Tyrrhenian Sea, Arthur meets up with his ragtag gang of tomb raiders, looters of Etruscan funeral objects and archaeological marvels. Arthur has a gift that he uses to help the gang: he can sense emptiness. He can feel that hole in the ground containing the legacy of a past world. The same hole that the memory of his lost love, Beniamina, has created in him. The intertwined destinies of these characters play out in an adventurous journey through the living and the dead, in forests and cities, at parties and in solitude, each chasing their Chimera.