Alice Rohrwacher's fourth full-length
feature La Chimera boosted its status as one of the long-odds
favourites for the Golden Palm with glowing reviews Saturday
after its premiere at Cannes Friday night.
The Guardian called it "beguiling," and Variety "marvelously
supple", while The Hollywood Reporter said that the 41-year-old
Fiesole-born director "makes movies like no one else".
In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw said: "Rohrwacher's new film is
a beguiling fantasy-comedy of lost love: garrulous, uproarious
and celebratory in her absolutely distinctive style. It's a
movie bustling and teeming with life, with characters fighting,
singing, thieving and breaking the fourth wall to address us
directly."
He ended his review by saying: "La Chimera is a film that
utterly occupies its own fictional space; it expresses its
eccentric romance in its own fluent movie dialect. I was utterly
captivated by this sad, lovelorn adventure."
Writing in Variety, Guy Lodge said: "this eccentric, romantic
tale of competing grave-robbers in Central Italy touches the
transcendental without diving into the outright fabulism of
2018's "Happy as Lazzaro."
For Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney said: "Alice Rohrwacher
makes movies like no one else. Her extraordinary work ventures
into Italy's labyrinthine past through fascinating pocket
communities, vanishing breeds that seem suspended in time."
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
Oarty and heavily autobiographical work by 69-year-old Nanni
Moretti who won in 2001 with The Boy'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
delightfully 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."
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.
The bookmakers have made the latest films of British auteur Ken
Loach, Finnish cult director Aki Kaurismaki, and German
directing great Wim Wenders the top three favourites for the
Pale d'Or, but Rohrwacher is seen as having an outside chance
along with Bellocchio.
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