The living and the dead, the hereafter and the hereafter, earth and heaven, human greed, capitalization of the non-capitalizable, lost love, illusion, matriarchy..

Tuscia 1980s, Arthur is an Englishman with a special gift: he senses the emptiness beneath the ground, a void that hides treasures belonging to the Etruscan period. Together with a group of ramshackle grave robbers he sells such finds to a mysterious buyer. The grave robbers exploit the subsoil and history to make money, but they are exploited in turn-the finds they recover will be paid them less than their actual value.

The god money is the entity that governs the universe of "The Chimera," the only character free from the mechanisms of economic gain at all costs is Italia, the young "servant" of the mother of Arthur's great love, a dead girl who always appears in dreams to the protagonist.

Alice Rohrwacher continues to use magical realism to create earthy, Marxist works. Cinematic short-circuits that annihilate various space-time coordinates to lead into "other" dimensions and yet so real and current.

Soundtrack that mixes the sacred and the profane (opera and Vasco Rossi), industrial landscapes worthy of Antonioni, actresses with Fellini-like physicality who look into the camera (a clear homage to the nouvelle vague) tell us about the feminism inherent in Etruscan culture, the use of film to give truth to the film. All of Alice's past cinema again finds form and substance between the folds of this fabulous tale.

The characters' lust for wealth also becomes a desire to change their miserable fate; the director is not so moralistic as to judge them exclusively negatively; their ambition amalgamates with that of Arthur, whose chimera is to be reunited with his beloved in a poetic dialogue between life and death, between earthly needs and ascetic abstractions.

For Rohrwacher, opening inviolable places means talking about the invisible, about what is mystical and what no longer is.

Free cinema, deliberately personal and flawed, totally untethered from both the expectations of the average audience and critics.

27-Nov-2023 by Ema