TOMB RAIDERS

LA CHIMERA Alice Rohrwacher dives into the treasure trove of Italy’s past for her latest curio…

What lies beneath: Josh O’Connor plays archaeologist Arthur, who gets involved with a network of Italian grave robbers

When Italian director Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro, The Wonders) was growing up in Umbria, she was surrounded by antiquities – and those that robbed them. ‘At night, men used to dig up the graves to find the treasures that were buried inside,’ she recalls. ‘They had been sacred for 2,000 to 3,000 years. But now they were taking out the objects.’

It got her thinking about what might drive someone to tamper with the ‘sacred meaning [of] something that belongs to the past’, resulting in her new film, La Chimera. In it, British actor Josh O’Connor plays Arthur, a young archeologist in 1980s Tuscany who falls in with a group of vagabonds filching Etruscan artefacts from graves before selling them on. As oblique as this sounds, Rohrwacher notes how this was a common practice.

‘It used to be much bigger than drug trafficking in the 80s and 90s,’ she says. ‘It was flourishing in Italy. Now the law has been changed, and therefore it’s no longer as practised as it was in the golden age, but in many countries – wherever there were strong past civilisations and architectural artefacts buried – this is an illegal practice that [regularly occurred].’

For the record, Rohrwacher is ‘obviously against the illegal aspect of this trafficking’ and the film is not a celebration of such larceny. ‘Mine is really a meditation on our relationship with the past, with the people who we’ve lost, with death, with the afterlife, with the dead themselves. And it’s not a coincidence that I wrote the film during the pandemic, when very abruptly the collective idea of death entered our lives.’

‘The film is a meditation on our relationship with death, with the afterlife…’

ALICE ROHRWACHER

Yet it would be wrong to think of La Chimera as morbid, boasting as it does the same Fellini-esque feel of her earlier works, especially 2018’s Happy as Lazzaro – the film that prompted O’Connor to write Rohrwacher an admiring fan letter. Initially, Rohrwacher wasn’t thinking of him for Arthur, who was written as a 60-year-old. ‘When I met him, I realised that he had a grace and melancholy and a bottled-up rage, which prompted me into changing the character.’

She also got to work with the ‘extraordinary’ Isabella Rossellini, who plays the aristocratic mother to Arthur’s lost love. Curiously, they even found a picture of Rossellini, as a baby, on the cover of a newspaper, part of a pile that the production designer brought in to decorate the set with. ‘She said, “Oh look, I was already on the cover of journals when I was a child!” The idea of her being on the front pages since she was born… and still being so humble, is just completely unique. She’s very rooted in the ground.’ Just like all those antiquities.