If you have not yet seen Alice Rohrwacher’s beautiful film, please do so as soon as you can. It is the love child of Federico Fellini and Lynne Ramsay, with touches of Agnès Varda’s tenderness.
When I first saw this film, I was convinced that Arthur (Josh O’Connor) would turn out to be one of the gods of antiquity travelling in disguise. We know this movie is set in the 80s because you can smoke indoors absolutely anywhere, and no one has a mobile phone. We encounter Arthur asleep on a train, his eyelids fluttering gently open to be confronted with the curious gazes of three girls with heavy eyeliner. When the train compartment doors are opened by a ticket inspector and then a seller of socks and perfume, there are remarks about Arthur’s unwashed odour. We can imagine the smell of stale clothes, old sweat, and how his ubiquitous cigarettes fail to mask this.
When he reaches the decaying villa occupied by Flora (Isabella Rossellini), it is Grey Gardens meets The Leopard, but with wood burning in the fireplace and coffee made in a Bialetti by Italia (Carol Duarte): dark, strong, acrid, drunk black with sugar. I imagine that Flora, despite her crumbling surroundings, smells like peonies, and powdered sugar. Arthur, her great favourite, is a criminal dandy in grubby pale linen, who might otherwise smell of sage, of thyme, of those hardy herbs that might grow wild near the makeshift hut he has built, and that he heats with a single gas cannister. But it is Italia who is the outsider here, and Flora’s middleclass daughters regard her with suspicion, and perhaps this is because she must smell like chocolate milk and the children she is concealing. During a later visit to Flora, we see Arthur begin to eat some some pasta but he soon prefers to smoke instead; a lit match, and “the smell of a bad boy” as my friend Topaz has put it.
Arthur acquires a brown shearling coat, battered and second hand, and it reminds me of my own leather coat, black with a white fur collar, and of another friend’s fur-lined vintage coat, which he says is too warm and tight-fitting to be worn with anything other than the lightest shirt. Leather worn close to the body acquires a particular patina and crease. When I bought a black leather jacket many years ago it was a little too smooth, but now it a roughness that I like. Suede that had become rough with age and lack of care returns to the state of feeling coarse, like the hide it really is, and this is the texture of the coat that Arthur wears here, insouciantly, over his thrift store suits.
The Tomabaroli, the band of grave robbers to which Arthur belongs, recall any number of Fellini films, and we meet them preparing for the feast of Epiphany, costumed and greeted as playful witches, sporting the trappings of femme: make up, large bosoms, headscarves. Josh O’Connor reminds me of Joaquin Phoenix in Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, her masterful film about a silent, sensitive hit man somewhere in the legacy of The Beat That My Heart Skipped (maybe I should do a little series? Beat That My Heart Skipped and You Were Never Really Here, their smells, their silences).
Mélodie (Lou Roy-Lecollinet) is a curvaceous blonde with crimped hair who also places this film in the 80s for me, she is beautiful but with something unconventional, like every beauty that Rohrwacher casts, and often these are performances that hinge on charisma and charm rather than the unstoppable force of physical beauty. Rorhwacher makes you see how this matters, it lets us understand O’Connor as Arthur vs O’Connor as Patrick in Challengers.
A bonfire at Epiphany, the smell of burning twigs, and Mélodie dancing around it. Later we see her lift her long skirt to pee in the dirt and how interested Pirro (Vincenzo Nemolato) is, you can tell he would watch if she let him. The Agnès Varda moment comes via Mélodie’s fourth wall break, where she tells us in French that if the Etruscans were still around there might be less machismo in Italy.
At a farm, hunting for tombs to open, we can imagine the small of fallen leaves as Arthur divines, mixed with the bitter herbal hit of Fernet Branca on the tongue. My husband and the guy who runs our local have a shared appreciation of Fernet, one of Italy’s many amaros, often left to gather dust at the back of the cocktail bar. Once, my husband and I saw a stag do subtly ushered from a restaurant by a mischievous server who brought fernet to the table as a digestif. They had wanted whiskey, but they were a large table, too loud and lingering for this place, and fernet saw them off.
It is Italia who tells the Tombaroli, on the shores of polluted waters, that the objects they take out of the grave, still covered in dirt like organic vegetables “weren’t made for human eyes” and on this occasion, what they find is not a grave at all, but another kind of ritual space. With tears in his eyes, Arthur looks on the face of Cybele, flanked by a mountain lion. The Tombaroli do not know her name at first, she is only dubbed Cybele later, by the mercenary art dealer Spartaco. Many other writers and critics have already sung the praises of La Chimera’s qualities, and I am just here to remind you that it is still beautiful, still worth seeing again or for the first time.