Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera, one of three Italian films up for the Golden Palm, went down well at Cannes Friday with 13 minutes of applause saluting the offbeat story of an English archaeologist played by Josh O'Connor (The Crown's Prince Charles) helping an oddball gang of Etruscan-tomb raiders sell their precious spoils to fences.
Rohrwacher, 41, is seen as the Italian favourite along with
83-year-old auteur Marco Bellocchio and his Kidnapped, about a
19th century pope's abduction of an allegedly secretly baptised
Jewish boy, one of a string of such embarrassing cases for the
Catholic Church.
A Brighter Tomorrow, a counter-historical Italian Communist
Party history and characteristically quirky and heavily
autobiographical work by 69-year-old Moretti who won in 2001
with The Son's Room, is less favoured by the bookies.
In La Chimera, O'Connor plays a romantic antihero who longs for
Beniamina, who is no longer there but whom he keeps looking for
to please her mother, the faded aristocrat Flora, played by
Isabella Rossellini.
Rohrwacher told reporters the film was about "the world of the
here and now and the world beyond the grave, the above and the
below, and then the mystery of the invisible and the
relationship with the universal."
La Chimera contains comic notes, magic, tension, the music of
balladers, circus caravans and the poetry of nature, defying
categorisation.
"Cinema is freedom," the director told ANSA. "I wanted to make a
film free from all these chains of narratives dictated by
platforms and which have now contaminated everybody."
Fiesole-born Rohrwacher made her directorial debut with Heavenly
Body (2011).
She has since directed notable films such as The Wonders (2014)
and Happy as Lazzaro (2018), which received the Cannes award for
best screenplay.
Her short Le pupille (2022) was nominated for the Academy Award
for Best Live Action Short Film
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