#LaChimera: Some Things Remain Sacred Only Beyond the Reach of Human Eyes ★★★★★ You’re not made for human eyes. brendanjohnanthony.substack.com/p/la-chimera...
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And in that surrender to the red thread, an echo of Orpheus and Eurydice, #LaChimera understands not everything buried is waiting to be found, and not every love is meant to return, some things remain sacred only in absence, beyond the reach of human eyes. boxd.it/dNARbX
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Arthur is taken in by the earth, as though it has always known him, and he, in some unspoken way, has always been moving back towards #LaChimera… the macabre truth is some souls are not lost to the past, but slowly returned to it, until they are reunited with the ones they love.
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That evanescent choice is what makes the denouement of #LaChimera devastate, because even after choosing life, he cannot let go of that red thread, and within that final descent, as the tunnel collapses and the ground closes around him, you realise this was never a choice at all.
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The tragedy of Arthur is that he shares in her destiny, even though Italia accepts him, her world accepts him, life accepts him, and he finally stands at the threshold between those two worlds, the living and the buried, and #LaChimera within his soul chooses life… for a moment.
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Grief shapes the soul differently, and within Flora is an act of devotion that refuses the dead their departure, #LaChimera of her soul ending at just that, a delusion, planting the haunting truth that some souls are destined to conflate what they have lost with the living world.
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Flora drifts through #LaChimera with the faded grandeur of a soul who has made her home out of denial, Isabella Rossellini painting a woman preserving that love because to surrender it would be another death, a devotion that begins to blur where the living ends and memory begins.
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Lingering over that nexus is the mother of Beniamina, Isabella Rossellini painting a theatrical melancholy that feels both absurd and profound, and yet, beneath the eccentricity is a loneliness she recognises within #LaChimera of Arthur, mourning a daughter who will never return.
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The wonder of Alice Rohrwacher is she never captures #LaChimera in that ache, her lens alive with absurdity and beauty, a world ascending and descending before you can feel it. That life matters, because within all of its undignified incessance, is why the past becomes seductive.
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Beniamina is the impossible call of the underworld, #LaChimera that grief may be answered if he descends just far enough, while Italia is the inescapable truth that love belongs to the living, and Josh O’Connor paints that ache with a macabre beauty… a dance with ruins and life.
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Their relationship holds the uncertainty of two souls who recognise their loneliness within one another, and that is why Arthur aches, not torn between women, but torn between two #LaChimera of longing… the pull of the myth beneath his feet and the fragile gravity of the living.
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Alice Rohrwacher never frames Italia as a moral or romantic corrective to Arthur, she is simply possibility, a witness to the grief that tethers him to the past, and yet, she never tries to excavate him, existing only as #LaChimera that love is above ground asking to be held now.
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And while Arthur is pulled to the past, Italia is the fragile gravity of the present, Carol Duarte the incandescence that refracts his haunted stillness. #LaChimera within her is the extraordinary world of the ordinary, quiet routines and kindness without asking for it in return.
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There is a moment at sea, Arthur revealing the severed head of a Cybele statue to a buyer, #LaChimera reduced to transaction, where that red thread pulls him towards its truth, and so, he returns it to the water, a depth untouched by the living… ‘You’re not made for human eyes.'
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Arthur senses that violation of #LaChimera, even as he leads the tombaroli towards the past, his face holding an anxiety his body refuses to acknowledge, every discovery both revelation and betrayal, the earth yielding secrets to him that were never meant to belong to the living.
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And Alice Rohrwacher frames that transformation of #LaChimera with a heartbreaking ache, her lens lingering on that contradiction within Arthur with deafening subtlety, the intricacy of never condemning him, and yet, never allowing you to forget the fragility of what he disturbs.
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The requiem for #LaChimera, of course, is that the moment those relics are touched by the light of an older sun, they become something else entirely… the Etruscans buried their artefacts with the dead because they belonged to a sacred conversation between life and the afterlife.
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That grief shapes his every movement, his spirit incessantly turned toward the past, and when he lowers that twig toward the soil and awaits its tremor… the moment feels almost intimate, the memory of #LaChimera still breathing undisturbed by the compromises of the living world.
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And Beniamina is the lost soul who calls to him from beneath the soil as though myth itself may return her, but Alice Rohrwacher is too spiritually alert to allow that longing to become #LaChimera itself… Arthur may listen to the past with reverence, but he still breaks into it.
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The creased white suit weighing upon his fallen shoulders as though he has been sleeping in grief and simply never changed… Arthur does not belong to the grave robbers, nor even archaeology, the soul absent from his life is #LaChimera through which he experiences absence itself.
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The haunting beauty of #LaChimera is that it makes him indispensable to Italian grave robbers, the tombaroli, but Arthur is never exhilarated by discovery, his gift in fact a wound born of grief… the one thing he longs for, lost to the past, and yet, is still buried beneath him.
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Parts of that man are bound to a buried world, melancholy breathing through that ethereal physicality of Josh O'Connor, the soil beneath his feet all that Arthur is attuned to, tethered to the red thread of what he has lost with only a dowsing twig and #LaChimera within his soul.
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Time forgotten is never quiescent within the photosynthesis of history, awakening #LaChimera within a soul lonely enough to disturb it as he listens to the past beneath him, secrets older than the language used to speak them, and as it looks back, all that is felt… is intrusion.
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And Alice Rohrwacher graces the dead with an active presence, witness to history as a breathing continuum, that to disturb #LaChimera is to interrupt a conversation already taking place without you, that the souls once bound in flesh and the relics they left behind… are private.
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Beneath the Italian soil are entire universes, #LaChimera lost to time, tombs built to protect the dead, and the intimacy within artefacts of a life once lived… and yet, the earth reluctantly surrenders that wonder to hands that profess to rescue memory at the cost of sacrilege.
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A melancholic dance of theft and longing is undone at the fragile beauty of an artefact resting in the hand, a lament for truth that the iridescence within the human eye that beholds it is also what tears that wonder from #LaChimera into a realm it was never meant for. ★★★★★
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Illustrated Japanese handbill for the movie La Chimera, made to resemble a tarot card
Only just managed to watch #LaChimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023) - and twice in a row! - still reeling at what an impossibly good film it was.
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Talk Without Rhythm Podcast ep 802: Journey to Italy (1954) and La Chimera (2023)
tworpodcast.blogspot.com/2026/01/epis...
#TWoRP #Film #Podcast #FilmSky #JourneyToItaly #RobertoRossellini #IngridBergman #LaChimera #AliceRohrwacher #JoshOConnor
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