La Chimera

After seeing all of the rave reviews for La Chimera I was really excited to see it at the Broadway last night.  It is incredibly thought provoking and, the more I think about it, the more I like it.  Arthur (Josh O'Connor) is a British archaeologist who has just been released from a stint in prison for grave robbing and is returning to a small town in Tuscany.  He visits Flora (Isabella Rossellini), the mother of a former girlfriend named Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello) who has disappeared from his life but still haunts his dreams, and he befriends Flora's no nonsense music student and housekeeper Italia (Carol Duarte).  However, he soon finds himself back with an eccentric group of tomb raiders using his gift of divining, during which he goes into a fugue state, to locate ancient Etruscan antiquities to sell on the black market through an enigmatic broker named Spartaco (Alba Rohrwacher).  When he finds an untouched tomb full of treasure he must decide of he wants to live in the past or the present.  The story meanders very slowly and there are many shifts in tone (Arthur is a morose and melancholy character while his crew is wild and boisterous, there are images of a sun-dappled Tuscany juxtaposed with dark and gloomy underground tombs, and scenes depicting stark reality are interspersed with magical realism) and changes in format which are sometimes quite disorienting (by design).  Everything suddenly comes together in the end (and upon further reflection) but there were many times when I wondered what was going on and this kept me surprisingly engaged.  The haunting and beautiful final scene is worth all of the effort it takes to untangle the narrative (the allusions to Ariadne and Theseus are brilliant).  O'Connor's moody and otherworldly performance is perfect because Arthur is odds with everyone and everything around him (at one point I wondered if it was all just a dream) and I loved Rossellini's turn as an imperious aristocrat living in a crumbling mansion.  This movie defies description and categorization but I know I will be thinking about it for a long time to come!