Secrets of La Chimera: Adventures in Fantasy

Release Date：Mar/29/2024

Genre：Advernture/Comedy/Fantasy

Director：Alice Rohrwacher

Cast：Josh O'Connor、Carol Duarte、Vincenzo Nemolato、Isabella Rossellini、Alba Rohrwacher

Viola's Rating：8.3

Oscar-nominated Italian director, editor and screenwriter Alice Rohrwacher’s latest feature film, La Chimera, was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, and was released limited in the US on Mar 29, 2024.

Despite being an adventurous fantasy comedy, La Chimera tells a tragedy about a group of archaeologists (or are they?) and the black market of historical artifacts.

Being depicted as folklore, the story of La Chimera is told by a bard, giving the audience a feeling that whether this story is true or not isn’t confirmed, but the charisma of the story is there.

Aside from the format of storytelling, the protagonist of La Chimera, Arthur, wanders between two worlds, the living and the dead, providing a fantasy ambiance to the film, and the ending not only closes the story perfectly but also leaves moviegoers with a warm-hearted relief.

Chimera means a hybrid creature. In La Chimera, Arthur isn’t a combination of different creatures, but he has a special power that can help him with his life-devoted work. Other characters in the flick call it a “gift,” but to Arthur, it might be something different. It’s just the key for him to find what he truly wants.

La Chimera was filmed with 16mm, 35mm and Super 16 formats to alternate the different atmospheres throughout the motion picture, which also distinguishes the two worlds and the differences between past and present.

It may seem that La Chimera is a movie related to art or history, but they’re just key elements of the plot. Just like the Heart of the Ocean in Titanic, of course, all the treasures found in La Chimera are precious, but they’re artifacts works created by their creators, not something made for human eyes, especially when they’re found by people who don’t appreciate their beauty, and only see the revenue they can receive from these treasures. 

Arthur is having a dilemma in La Chimera because he isn’t sure whether he is an archaeologist or a tomb raider. Everything in the picture seems very dreamy and fantastical. Although the feature film is set in the 1980s, and there are definitely tomb raiders nowadays, it still feels that the audience’s sense of time is lost with Arthur’s lost soul. Even though the protagonist is stealing from the dead with his fellow coworkers, moviegoers still root for him, and truly hope that Arthur will never get caught. That’s the magical power of a successful film.

The audience may not fully understand what La Chimera wants to tell us in the beginning, but as we follow Arthur through his journey, little by little, we start to realize that the flick is actually a healing process for him, and eventually, moviegoers experience the freedom Arthur finally gets in the end.

Picture Credit: atmovies