La Chimera

*The garden of Bomarzo, also known as the ‘Sacro Bosco’*

‘La Chimera’, Alice Rohrwacher’s recent film, is oneiric, dreamlike. Charged with references to and quotes from varied sources, comprising different styles of film-making and changes of pace, it is suffused with ambiguity and ambivalence. Remarkably, though, it remains coherent. With distant references to fairy-tales and myths, as well as echoes of Italo Calvino’s stories and those of Luigi Pirandello, ‘La Chimera’ is also influenced by down-to-earth Italian neo-realist cinema; the blend sounds unpromising and yet is compelling. The film is imaginative, earnest, but doesn’t take itself too seriously, and in that light, when asked about her inspirations, Rohrwacher has mentioned the ‘Sacro Bosco’, the 16th century Mannerist garden of Bomarzo in Lazio, commissioned by Pier Francesco Orsini, known as Vicino. Situated in a wooded valley below the castle of Orsini, it is full of grotesque sculptures and curious small buildings, and as a child she was particularly struck by the tilted house, in which everything leans to one side. ‘When you leave’, she said, ‘your whole vision has changed; it distorts your picture of reality. This is something that I try to do in my film-making, to give you something that is very real, like that little house, but a little bit askew, so it opens up your vision’.

’La Chimera’, in broad terms, is a story about the Italian ‘tombaroli’ who looted hundreds of ancient Etruscan tombs in the 1980s, but its focus is Arthur, an Englishman with an otherworldly gift for finding them. Just out of prison, grumpy, melancholic, and searching for his missing girlfriend, Beniamina, who may or may not be dead, he is drawn to the dark but longs for light and the sky; it is perhaps significant that on one of the advertising posters Arthur is depicted as the Tarot’s upside-down ‘Hanged Man’, and from time to time in the film the camera inverts and shows him in that position. The symbolism of the ‘Hanged Man’ card is fluid and enigmatic, but it is often interpreted as an emblem of someone who sees the world from an unusual perspective and is doing so by choice, the calm and serene face, as well as the halo, being suggestive of insight and enlightenment. The Tarot connection to Arthur, like much else in the film, is obscure and unexplained, but it may not be coincidental that his exploits are celebrated in a troubadour’s songs, like those of a mythical or folk hero.

‘La Chimera’, however, is about more than Arthur and the tomb-robbers; the film concerns mankind’s deteriorating relationship to the past, and it alludes to the perils of materialism, greed and excessive individualism, its ‘magic realism’ celebrating, in contrast, the mysteries of the unknown and unseen, of darkness and light. ‘La Chimera’ is woven from many different threads, all of them connected. One, both literal and symbolic, begins and ends the film. Arthur is alone in the world and has lost Beniamina, the only person who rooted him in it, but he is still bound to her by a red thread; as a consequence, rather like Orpheus and Eurydice, he is closer to the beyond than to the here and now. His curious mixture of obduracy, openness, and vulnerability are qualities with which Rohrwacher may herself be familiar; she has said that the figure with whom she most identifies is that of the tightrope walker who hesitates and wavers, and who, despite a few missteps, is determined to make it across to the other side. Nevertheless, athough he is a loner, Arthur is drawn to a sense of community, which he observes in the ways and traditions of the local people, and which he also discovers in the women’s group that has transformed an abandoned railway station into a shared home where new lives can be nurtured. The essence of the film, according to Rohrwacher, is an exploration of shared memories, values, and aspirations, not simply a story about a particular man’s ‘chimera’, his dreams and fantasies.

In an article on the poetry of Alice Rohrwacher’s films, Emma Wilson has suggested a possible connection between the film and ‘Les Chimères’, the sequence of poems written by Gérard de Nerval, who, as Daniel Mark Epstein has explained in an introduction to them, prompted Baudelaire’s idea of the ‘poète maudit’, whose vision is so intense that the world will destroy him if he doesn’t destroy himself first. Like Edgar Allan Poe, another of Baudelaire’s creative influences, the unfortunate Nerval suffered from manic depression and delusions of grandeur, and after a severe episode in 1841, he was pronounced insane and kept in hospital for nine months. It was during this period that he wrote the first of the poems for ‘Les Chimères’, and it was also when he changed his name from ‘Labrunie’ to ‘Nerval’, based on a genealogy he invented, in which he was descended from the Roman emperor Nerva by way of relatives of Napoleon. For the rest of his life, Nerval tried to sublimate his intense emotions in writing, but he remained unhappy and eccentric. Increasingly disoriented and poverty-stricken, he took his own life, by hanging, in 1855.

The twelve sonnets of ‘Les Chimères’, Nerval’s most famous poems, resist easy interpretation, but their core feeling is not unlike that in Dante’s ‘La Vita Nuova’, where the yearning for a woman, the pain of lost love, and the desire to atone with the beloved are the first steps in the soul’s journey toward divine love and illumination. The sequence of ‘Les Chimères’ is in three parts, beginning with six poems for the lost ‘inamorata’, who appears as a vanished bride, then as a queen, a sorceress, muse, and priestess; in ‘Artemis’ she becomes death, who has loved the poet ‘from cradle to tomb’. In these verses, much like the tale of the hapless Arthur in Alice Rohrwacher’s wonderful film, Nerval combines a longing for an unattainable woman with lamentations for the spiritual energy that was once engendered by ancient goddesses.

For further exploration:

Alice Rohrwacher on her film: https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/may/06/alice-rohrwacher-tomb-raiding-chimera-looters-josh-o-connor

One of the many interesting reviews of ‘La Chimera’: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/la-chimera-joyous-masterful-work-folk-magic

A very good analysis of Rohrwacher’s films: https://filmquarterly.org/2024/05/28/alice-rohrwachers-cinema-of-poetry/

The gardens of Bomarzo: http://www.doremishock.com/parcodeimostri/parcodeimostri-1.htm

The Tarot’s ‘Hanged Man’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hanged_Man_(tarot_card)

Gérard de Nerval’s ‘Les Chimères’: https://newcriterion.com/article/les-chimeres-by-gerard-de-nerval/

and: https://newcriterion.com/article/introduction-to-gerard-de-nervalas-ldquochimerasrdquo/

There is an earlier piece on Alice Rohrwacher in ‘Panta Rhei’: https://www.jaykayaitch.org/blog/6sg4la7jk72brumcn8ryn9tazw6a4m-xrk39-e7jkx-ysrtr-6efwn-k5c8k-jtrhf-d7x86-zgr3l-ledse-l4fga-3e7w2-ttstz-ngxa4-94ep5-eewxt-h9lm5-67g6m-yghp8-25xaz-g243f

Current listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W_AYI0n_Kg