‘La Chimera’ director Alice Rohrwacher has a gift for stories on the edge of realism.
Gian Piero Capretto, Ramona Fiorini, Melchiorre Pala, Josh O’Connor, Giuliano Mantovani, Luca Gargiullo, Vincenzo Nemolato and Lou Roy-Lecollinet in “La Chimera.” 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.
The tombaroli are mostly men, easygoing layabouts with names like Pirro and Melchiorre and played, ingratiatingly, by nonprofessionals. Arthur, by contrast, is melodramatically mourning a lost love , one of the many daughters of Flora , 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.
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.
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