With only four films, Alice Rohrwacher has emerged as the most interesting Italian director of her generation, weaving poetic and earthly cinema, between fable and reality, which is reflected in Corpo celeste, Wonderland and Happy Lazzaro. With The Chimera, which she presents at a D'A Film Festival that honors her this year with the Honor Award, she takes a leap in her cinematography, narrating the adventures of Arthur, a young Englishman who is sparse in words (Josh O'Connor) who ends up After being released from prison, he joins a gang of tombaroli, robbers of ancient tombs, especially Etruscan, while trying to find his beloved Beniamina, the woman he lost. A story that participated in the official section of the Cannes Film Festival, will hit the screens on April 19 and talks about life, death, the past and present and, above all, the concept of property.
When was the first time you heard about 'tombaroli'?
I grew up in a place like the one that appears in the movie, a place where there was like a fever, a kind of treasure hunt. Many times I saw them at the bar, sitting there, and talking about the finds they had found the night before. These thugs, so to speak, scared me a little. Not so much because they did illegal things, but rather because they took the things of the dead, even if they were dead from 2,000 years ago. In general, with all the things that scare me, I try to establish a certain friendship. I began to talk to them to understand clearly where they found the pride and the right to open what was sacred. And I understood that although they saw themselves as thieves, in reality they were the healthy children of a sick system, of a materialistic world that no longer believes in anything and that sees the possibility of entering these tombs and stealing. Because nothing is invisible and everything is merchandise to buy and sell. In fact, all this has changed because the law has changed. From the late 1970s to the 2000s, there was a high demand from museums, collectors and individuals for unique archaeological objects. There was no clear legislation that protected all these artifacts and objects. Where there is a market, traffic is generated. And not that I say it. Journalist Fabio Isman said that there came a point where all this trafficking generated figures higher than the drug market.
There is a question that is uttered several times in the film: Is this for everyone or for none? In fact, all his films ultimately talk about how we are all a little bit of victims of capitalism. Whose art do you think it is?
Normally what I do is influenced by what I have around me. Within this Western society we are as if heated, we are not in the bain-marie of this capitalism, and it is difficult to get out of there. The film revolves around the idea of ownership, of who things are and who they will be. What is past and what we are going to leave in the future. I like to think of archaeologists as guardians of everything that ends. When something comes to an end, it takes on this magic of being history. When we are gone, perhaps we should reflect on what we are going to leave behind. When studying capitalism in museums, for example. It is this thought of the archaeologists of the future and that is why the illusion of creating and leaving beautiful things beyond weapons or spills and waste. Traveling to this underground world of objects created for souls, the thought of someone wasting years of their life with manual labor and then hiding it is almost crazy to us. However, there were civilizations that did so. As a director, the most beautiful feeling is when a film seems like it wasn't made by that director. That movie does not belong to that person. Because it doesn't really matter whose movie it is. It matters that this film exists and was made. Sometimes they tell me that I do evoke Fellini or Pasolini. But it is not them who are evoked but the reality that brings me closer to them. It is by watching his films that I have been able to achieve all this. His creations come out of what is common.
What fascinates you about the Etruscan civilization? Mélodie's character says, looking at the camera, that if the Etruscans still existed there wouldn't be so much machismo in Italy...
Well, perhaps fascism is a consequence of machismo, to go further. What I like about the Etruscan civilization is that it is like the layer under which I live. You scratch anywhere and you get pieces that someone left there a long time ago. It is the civilization with which I have been most in contact since I was little. The point is to live in a place where people have already lived and that is something unique in Europe compared to other places in the world. We live in houses where people have already lived, on lands that have already been inhabited. And it's like a teaching. Regarding the Etruscan imagination, I am not an archaeologist and I am basing it on what has come down to us, but it seems to me to be a fairly serene civilization, where men and women seemed to live quite equally and hence also the desire to introduce this little joke in the film to Remember that the decision of patriarchy is not a natural condition of the human being but a historical decision and I hope that times are coming where this begins to change and take other paths. Reflecting above all on the fact that many things that we take for granted are not natural and respond to a decision that has been made at some point and the fact of stating it in this way gives room for other alternatives. Hence, Mélodie makes this comment towards the viewer in a more playful way because there is a lot of play in the film.
Would we see one of those alternatives in that abandoned train station where women have created a kind of commune?
Symbolically it has strength. It is like a place that has its history and can change. We see characters in the film who are as if crushed by history. This is the case of Flora, played by Isabella Rossellini, obsessed with the past. Even from Arthur himself. There are also the tombaroli, who want to sell this past that does not matter to them. And I was interested in the idea of proposing a third way, that of transformation with this woman, Italy, to see if that influences some hope in a country that is not going through good times, that does not see the past even as a condemnation. not as a shame, but as a place to live, transform and create less predictable futures.
What has it been like working with Josh O'Connor and Isabella Rossellini? Did you always have them in mind?
The only problem is that after working with them I would only want to work with them. I'm desperate thinking about projects so I can continue working with them (laughs). They are two extremely generous and fantastical people. With both of them it has been a party to film. The beauty of making films is putting two worlds in contact and here the lampista comes out, neighbors of my town, of my reality, and that has led to a certain friendship between them. This contact is very important because there is curiosity, both on the part of professional actors and those who are not.
