Josh O’Connor’s most characteristic facial expression is the sheepish grin, a look he made his own when he played the young Prince of Wales in the third season of The Crown, which is odd because Charles in real life never came across as anything but self-confident and O’Connor seemed to be implying that he was grievously intimidated by the even younger Diana Spencer, a reading of the situation that probably changed a lot of people’s thinking about that relationship. Whether it was based on anything other than O’Connor’s peculiar acting style, the expression has also been dominant in subsequent roles with characters who don’t always seem as shy as O’Connor interprets them. In Alice Rohrwacher’s quite original quasi-fantasy, he plays a lapsed archaeologist with a huge chip on his shoulder slumming it in a rural Italian town as the mystic-leader of a ragtag band of tomb-robbers, or tambaroli, in the local parlance. His British expat, Arthur, is dour to the point of surliness, but can still eke out a shy smile when he needs to charm the audience—though never, it would seem, his on-screen interlocutors. I like O’Connor, but I wish he’d cut it out.

The reason for Arthur’s chronic glumness and dishevelment is never explicitly explained, though it probably has something to do with the absence of the love of his life, Beniamina (Yile Vianello), who is only shown in what I assume are memories that flit through Arthur’s brain when prompted by some outside stimulus. Though the viewer eventually gleans that the girl is dead, she is never declared as such by Arthur, at least not in front of her mother, Flora (Isabella Rossellini), a wheelchair-bound singing instructor living in a broken-down villa who stares down her gaggle of daughters and grand-daughters, all of whom do think Beniamina is dead and want Flora to move into a nursing home. Just as Rohrwacher never lets on what it was that led to Arthur’s rupture with the academic discipline he once pursued, there’s no mention of how Beniamina came into his life, and at various junctures there are hints that everything is a figment of his imagination. The exception is the milieu, which is not the usual sun-kissed, leafy tourist paradise we expect from movies set in the Italian countryside, but basically a despoiled landscape filled with crumbling shacks, unkempt forests, and toxic industrial wastelands. Here, Arthur and his merry troupe look for underground grave cavities containing Etruscan pottery and sculptures, which Arthur locates using a dowsing rod until he becomes sick to his stomach, thus indicating that the dead dwell just below his feet. The group then clandestinely sells the contraband—all relics in Italy belong to the state, and the police are constantly on the lookout for poachers—to a mysterious rich person named Spartico (Alba Rohrwacher), but Arthur is not interested in money. He’s still hung up on beauty, which is why his impulses tend to run opposite to the aims of his accomplices. The only person who seems to understand him is Italia (Carol Duarte), Flora’s tone-deaf student and reluctant servant, who objects to the raiding of the deceased, no matter how many centuries they’ve been gone. It’s perhaps this doctrinaire moral stance that attracts Arthur, but he’s such a cipher that it becomes a chore just trying to make sense of his behavior. 

The same goes for Rohrwacher’s magical realist-style direction, which flips the camera every which way in order to keep the viewer off balance and jumbles the development into a collage of often counteractive intentions. Which isn’t to say La Chimera is frustrating or annoying. It works well as a comedy of errors with its colorful, intriguing characters, including Arthur, whose sourness never tips so far over as to fall into despair. Whatever the purpose of that enigmatic grin, it helps alleviate the movie’s latent sense of misery. 

In Italian and English. Opens July 19 in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-675-5280), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

La Chimera home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 tempestra srl, Ad Vitam Production, Amka Films Productions, Arte France Cinema