La Chimera

Weeks of unvarnished sunshine gave way to clouds and scattered thunderstorms, bringing about the sudden sense that summer was coming to an end, languid days and sweat quickly unspooling before me to evoke a dread that is not unlike the feeling you get before the roller coaster drops. Out of an instinct to insulate myself against the darkening days, I found myself retreating into a melancholic interiority, burnished by faithful company from raccoon memes, my Nintendo Switch, and the occasional nihilism, the third of which I had sought to escape from by indulging in my Yorck Unlimited subscription. In two weeks of false spring or doomed summer or a hugely misconceived notion of what the weather foretold, I caught about one movie every two days.

On my 2nd viewing of Alice Rohrwach’s La Chimera, a rare incursion of beauty. The film follows a British archaelogist, Arthur, who in his besotten white suit and foreign Italian accent, looks severely out of place in 1980s Tuscany. Arthur fills his time consorting with a band of local graverobbers to profit and be merry, except we see that he is not really merry. The source of his misery seems to be connected to a mysterious woman, who appears in dreamlike sequences, leaving behind the red thread of her knitted dress which Arthur tries to follow but fails. We later find out that the woman is Benamina, a former lover who has died. Throughout the film, Arthur is continually seized by his memory of her, and the audience is seized by the terrible truth that Arthur can unearth as many Etruscan treasures as he wants, but he can never recover a past forever lost to him. Interwoven with this symbolism of lost love is the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. To symbolize their love, Orpheus ties a red string around Eurydice’s finger, promises he will find her wherever she goes, even in the underworld. Naturally a lot of the film involves the underworld, the underground digging for totemic offerings, the seedy underbelly of art-trafficking, but its most poignant iteration is also its most literal: towards the end, Arthur gets buried alive. He yells at first, beats his fists against the earth. But then he notices a red thread, follows it into an opening. Emerging from the ground, he sees Benamina and falls into her embrace.