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The central character is a comic wet blanket: Arthur (Josh O’Connor), a mopey British archaeologist who’s gone native in Italy, assisting the tombaroli as a kind of “tomb whisperer” who can sniff out an underground crypt using only a dowsing rod and his own sixth sense. The pottery and burial effigies he and his crew unearth are fenced to an unseen local big shot and presumably find their way to museums and private collections; for the tombaroli, dodging the police while looting their country’s cultural patrimony is just a way to add excitement and extra money to hardscrabble lives. Where Arthur reveres ancient history, his criminal accomplices simply see it as a well-stocked larder.
The tombaroli are mostly men, easygoing layabouts with names like Pirro (Vincenzo Nemolato) and Melchiorre (Melchiorre Pala) and played, ingratiatingly, by nonprofessionals. Arthur, by contrast, is melodramatically mourning a lost love (Yile Yara Vianello), one of the many daughters of Flora (Isabella Rossellini), an eccentric aristocrat who lives in a crumbling villa and dotes on Arthur like a favored pet. Rossellini appears in only a handful of scenes, but she makes each one a six-course meal.
O’Connor is best known for playing the young Prince Charles in two seasons of “The Crown,” and he may be better known in a few weeks as one-third of the romantic triangle in the tennis drama “Challengers”; he’s a visceral, present-tense performer who here hides his charisma beneath a bushel of grumpy romantic disenchantment. Arthur’s a snob and a malcontent who knows he’s wasting his gifts, and the deadpan comedy of “La Chimera” lies in watching him brought reluctantly back to life by Italia, who’s either Flora’s hapless housemaid or her equally tone-deaf music student. Possibly both.
Italia — her name is such a honking bit of symbolism that even the other characters joke about it — is played by the Brazilian actress Carol Duarte with a no-nonsense air of nonsense, if such a thing exists. She’s the only person here who looks on the tomb raiding with anything like moral disapproval, and she sidles from the movie’s fringes to its center stage with delightful assurance.
Rohrwacher made the critically acclaimed “Happy as Lazzaro” (2018), a magical realist parable about medieval farm laborers in the 20th century, and her 2022 Oscar-nominated short “Le Pupille” (“The Pupils”) is a brilliantly funny tale of rebellion at a girls’ convent school that continues to stream on Disney Plus. She has the shaggy-dog imagination of her countryman Federico Fellini and the acute eye for societal and personal relationships of Roberto Rossellini, but her gift for stories that balance on the edge of realism and fable is unique. A mid-movie tomb-raiding montage set to a pair of local musicians mythologizing the story even as it’s happening is Rohrwacher at her felicitous best, and her use of differing film stocks and characters addressing the audience evokes the casual inventiveness of folk art.
The director also has a sense of the land — of Italy as a country, as history, as buried treasure, as earth — that makes this movie as much an experience as a narrative. The earth is what draws both Arthur and the tombaroli in “La Chimera,” the film’s title hinting at all the dreams of money and meaning that lead them on. The danger is landing in jail or, worse, being buried alive by the weight of history, archaeological or romantic.
Rohrwacher offers a way up and out for her sad-sack hero, but it’s not clear whether it leads to reality or simply more dreaming. To paraphrase Faulkner, the past isn’t even past in this movie — it’s coursing vibrantly along right beneath our feet.
Unrated (as PG). At AMC Hoffman Center 22 and Avalon Theatre. Crimes against national heritage, bad housekeeping. 132 minutes.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
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