I watched La Chimera about a week ago, and can't seem to shake it. If you've not seen it, there will be spoilers here-
La chimera is one of those rare films that I truly love- full of strangeness and layers of sorrow, its symbolic language written clear in bright red letters against the grimy, sun-dappled backdrop of 80s Italy. It's a rangy tale, despite this, explaining little and trusting the audience will follow.The central protagonist, Arthur, in his ever increasingly dingy linen suit, wanders about finding Etruscan tombs (finding, or rather, drawn towards them by dowsing rods, by a silent call he hears from them, come, find me) so that he and his fellow tomberoli can loot them for meagre cash on the black market, whose central hub is a poky but oddly high tech vet hospital. Arthur is implied to have just got out of jail, a result of his escapades, but his sullen face and interior mode are the result of a deeper pain, explored in flashes of a red haired woman, following the unravelling red thread of her dress. Whenever we see Arthur next to the red thread, we know a turn is happening. An irrevocable moment as he moves further into his grief - his labyrinth. There's one classical reference, also Orpheus and Euridice. The cultural whisperings of the Etruscans within the contemporary people Arthur encounters. The breaking of the taboo of the grave, the idea that some things are not meant for human eyes. In one scene, drawn perhaps from a moment in Fellini's Roma, air rushes into an opened tomb, instantly oxidizing the painted birds and scrolls within, leaving it dull. Arthur comes to a crisis, understanding at last the magnitude of what he has been doing in opening these places and removing their treasures. Yet he cannot help himself but keep looking for the unseen under the earth
What I love is a protagonist who is supernaturally good at what they do, yet desperately failing in other aspects of their life. Arthur can barely keep his body together, living in a shack outside the walls of a town, disheveled and nearly silent, except for his expressive glances, the moments he turns back. As an aside, I tried to think if there are female characters who are allowed to be expert, haunted, and shabby, but could think of none, while several male characters came to mind. Perhaps something I'll look to probing later, when time opens for me and I can write again, in the autumn.
Another thought I kept turning over was the idea of “getting something”. Often I've heard “I didn't get it”, said of work I've loved. And it always rankles. My preference is not to “get” but to follow, to see where a book or film wants to take me. I might not understand all I see- I for sure don't understand every Etruscan object's significance in la Chimera, nor every reference to Italian cinema it makes- but I hope to be enacted upon. Done to- but perhaps more the way the light does to us.
You might not have the same experience I do, or might at something I have less regard for, dismiss- or need to revisit, when the wind is blowing in the right direction, or the birds murmurating between other trees. The light. God, or a god. I think of the light in Arthur's eyes in the goddess’s shrine, a moment that was electric for me, because of recognition. The transfiguration of art, how it holds a richer power than can be articulated, but unfolds us. Unmakes our labyrinths, if even for a moment.
There’s an Australian film wherein the chimera Judy Davis is A rock'n roll singer who gets stranded in a small Australian town after losing her job in a band. She winds up in a trailer park only to encounter, by accident, the teenage daughter she deserted. I was transfixed by her character.