Pasatiempo

A fable of lost love and grave robbing

Antiquity and the modern day sit side by side in the films of Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher, permeating each other with the timelessne­ss of a folk tale passed around a campfire. La Chimera, the writer-director’s latest, concerns a raffish band of working-class tombaroli — grave robbers — who dig up ancient Etruscan artifacts and sell them on the black market, but the movie’s also a meditation on the tension between romanticiz­ing the past and profiting from it. Wise, funny, and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer.

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 onethird 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 sadsack 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.

Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommenda­tion newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswat­chlist.com.

Comedy/drama, not rated, Italian with subtitles, 130 minutes, CCA, Violet Crown, 3.5 chiles