Josh O’Connor in La Chimera (2023) | Dir. by Alice Rohrwacher / ©Tempesta, Rai Cinema, courtesy of Ad Vitam Production and Amka Films
One setting in Alice Rohrwacher’s 2024 film, La Chimera, collapses two thousand years of Italian history: an Etruscan gravesite in the shadow of a power plant. Here, where polluted ocean water laps at ancient dirt, the film’s merry band of tomb raiders (tombaroli) discover an untouched tomb brimming with artifacts—most notably, a goddess statue in perfect condition. One ecstatic thief says: “Never mind the souls, the Etruscans left these here for us.”
Arthur (Josh O’Connor), the leader of the pack, acts more subdued. He is melancholic, gruff, and a touch mystical, able to sense tombs in the ground beneath him. His motives run deeper than monetary gain. While his gang speaks of imminent fortune and plans to sell their finds on the black market, Arthur holds a candle up to the goddess’s face. His eyes fill with longing. She reminds him of someone: a lost love.
The film begins with that lost love, Beniamina (Yile Vianello), whose face fills its opening shot, sunlit and close—until a train conductor jolts Arthur awake. Arthur is on his way home from a stint in prison, the consequence of a botched tomb raid. Upon returning, he visits Beniamina’s mother, Flora (Isabella Rossellini), in her decaying villa, where he meets Flora’s live-in student, Italia (Carol Duarte), an awkward yet enchanting woman whose vitality will challenge his pull toward the past.
While Italian history contains some of humanity’s most retold stories, the Etruscans carry an aura of mystery. They thrived in Italy before the rise of the Roman Empire, and their heartland was what is now known as Tuscany, where director Alice Rohrwacher was born and raised some two thousand years later. Most of what modern archaeologists know about the Etruscans has been gleaned from their vast necropolises and elaborate tombs. These tombs often borrowed construction elements from homes for the living and were filled with grave goods—urns, sculptures, jewelry, kitchenware—that suggest belief in an afterlife, where the deceased would appreciate these valuable objects.
La Chimera, set in 1980s Tuscany, is Rohrwacher’s latest film about modern Italy’s relationship with—and commodification of—its past. In Rohrwacher’s words, it sits alongside 2014’s The Wonders and 2018’s Happy as Lazzaro “not as a trilogy, but as three paintings on an altar.”
All three films present clashes between these imagined pasts and extractive presents. The Wonders centers on a family of Tuscan beekeepers who enter a reality TV competition called Countryside Wonders, in which participants costumed in togas and animal skins hawk their artisanal goods in an excavated tomb. Happy as Lazzaro depicts sharecroppers on a tobacco farm; when a cop arrives on the scene and tells them that sharecropping has been outlawed in Italy for years, the family is thrust into contemporary urban life.
These narratives of time travel have a mythical quality, but Rohrwacher grounds their fabulist elements in stark environmental degradation and class struggle. While La Chimera’s Etruscan artifacts from the tombs of the wealthy take on “inestimable value” thousands of years after their creation, the petty thieves of the present are just “tiny cogs in the wheel,” according to the art dealer who buys their stolen goods: “One day the rust will eat them away. Nothing will be left.”
The tombaroli are a fruitful ensemble through which to examine these intersections of past and present. One member of the gang keeps an ancient artifact on the dashboard of his beat-up car, and Kraftwerk’s “Spacelab” plays over a tomb-raiding montage. By layering past and present, Rohrwacher encourages us to think about our own lives in terms of larger themes of destruction and remembrance. What do we desecrate in our desperation to keep up with capitalism’s churn? Will any of our acts of love last as long as the Etruscan tombs? The presence of the power plant over the tombs in La Chimera illustrates this tension. While the tombs preserve and sanctify, the plant extracts—at a scale that dwarfs the efforts of the tombaroli on the same beach.
Just before the tombaroli break into the goddess’s temple, the camera dips underground. In the dark, the men’s forceful digging is only a faint echo. Frescoes of birds, dances, meals—life—line the tomb’s walls. Suddenly, the tomb breaks open. The moment they meet outside air, the frescoes wither and fade. Though a new generation has found them and will mine them for profit, part of them has disappeared forever: like an angel’s share, a beauty belonging only to the souls.
After this fateful raid, Arthur grows more haunted. Do the souls of the dead miss what he has taken and sold? As he grapples with the moral murkiness of his profession, Italia presents an antidote to the get-it-while-you-can fatalism of greed—and the loneliness of chasing the dead through their tombs. She invites Arthur to join her in a new life, one in which once discarded spaces are transformed into sites of beauty and care. It feels like a decision between life and death. But, as the Etruscans tell us across centuries, the distinction between these two states may not be as clear as we think.
