Among the film critics I most respect and admire, one name instills a kind of enraptured reverence: Alice (pronounced the Italian way, “ah-lee-chay”). (Greta and Sofia also get it.)
That’s acclaimed filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, whose bracing works frequently evoke fables and fairy tales, often rely on nonprofessional actors, and explore themes of time, memory, history, and loss. Her four features since 2011 have all debuted at Cannes, where she served on the jury in 2019 (and spoke out about the industry’s failure to support female filmmakers). And in 2023 she received an Oscar nomination for Le Pupille, a Christmas-themed Disney+ live-action short produced by director Alfonso Cuarón.
Her new feature, La Chimera, the third part of an informal trilogy about Italian identity, is an enchanting spell of a movie mining the persistent ties between the past and the present, the living and the dead, and the seen and the unseen. Josh O’Connor learned Italian to play Arthur, a choleric English grave robber in 1980s Tuscany knocking around with a mischievous ragtag crew of fellow tombaroli. Isabella Rossellini, in Miss Havisham mode, plays Flora, the mother of his lost love who continues to haunt him, even as a sweet new acquaintance (Brazilian actor Carol Duarte) attempts to catch his eye.
Yet this spare plot description does little to capture the effect of this lovely film, which lingers long after the final, heartbreaking scene. Less a plot-driven work than one to surrender to, it’s sure to draw more converts to the devoted order of Rohrwacher.
From her home base in the remote Italian countryside, Rohrwacher—rosy-cheeked, with strawberry hair tangled in a knot atop her head—spoke to Vogue through a translator about the similarities between archaeology and filmmaking, why she suspects Federico Fellini had grave-robber friends, and the old man (and the “melancholia,” per her mellifluous pronunciation) she divined inside of rising star O’Connor.
Vogue: How does one come up with a film like this? I know you drew from your personal experience growing up in Etruria, an area full of ancient tombs and artifacts that were dug up with frequency in the ’80s and ’90s, and that you wrote this during COVID lockdown, with death heavy on your mind.
Alice Rohrwacher: Movies always come from afar—they often have a long incubation stage within us and then bloom whenever they feel like it. I’ve collected these stories over a long period. But I’ve always been passionate about archeology. I was a classics major at university, and I’ve always had a fascination with archeologists’ work. Making a movie is quite similar to what an archeologist does because they manage to see a story in places where others only see a bunch of stones. They succeed in recomposing a story, piecing it together from tiny abandoned pieces they find.
You worked with three kinds of film formats: 35mm, Super 16mm, and 16mm. What was the idea behind bringing these textures together?
We wanted to show the fingerprints of those who made this movie to some extent, similar to the emotion one can feel when they retrieve an antique vase and see the fingerprint of the vase maker from two thousand years ago. This human presence was very important. Cinematographer Hélène Louvart and I weren’t sure which film would be best because, at various moments, it had to convey contemplation, showcase the landscape, and also work as a kind of adventure movie.
The three film formats were also a way for this movie about history and archeology to tell the history of cinema as a material item. Young people don’t have many opportunities to see all these formats, as some have gone by the wayside. So we decided to keep them all, from the more amateur-filmmaking stock to a more narrative kind and a more pictorial one.
How did you come to cast Josh O’Connor as your protagonist? You rewrote the role for him.
Josh was a sign of destiny, to use an expression that would be familiar to those of the past. I was looking for a much older actor because I thought a character so nostalgic and a prisoner of such sadness needed to be a lot older, with a long past behind them. But Josh reached out to me. He wrote a letter—he says he actually wrote many before that one—that I finally received at my parents’ house. He asked to meet because he had really liked [Rohrwacher’s 2018 film] Happy as Lazzaro.
When we met, I had this evident feeling that even though he was a young man, there was something very old inside him. He had a sensitivity and generosity but also a melancholy of an older person. I then rewrote the script imagining a man perhaps inspired by the young romantics in the 19th century who would come to Italy because they were passionate about the ruins, the so-called grand tour.
How did Isabella Rossellini come on board?
Making a movie means spending a lot of time with people we respect. I base a lot of my decisions on that desire to share a little bit of my life with people I think highly of, and Isabella Rossellini is definitely one of them. I’m a huge fan of hers and had been hoping to work with her one day. I find her an incredible woman. She is full of vitality, very cheerful, but at the same time, she’s highly serious at a professional level and committed to everything related to the movie. She is not interested in just her own part. It’s like she marries projects—she really takes them on 100%.
Were there any films that you were particularly influenced by?
When one works on a story connected to memory, there are clearly some influences. But I rather call them associations, images calling other images. I interviewed many tombaroli, and they often said that when they would break into these sacred places, oxygen would also enter for the first time and so all these frescoes would fall off and objects would crash. That immediately reminded me of Fellini’s movie Roma. Fellini possibly had friends who were tombaroli.
I’m also very connected to the cinema of Roberto Rossellini, and when dealing with issues of people inhabiting the margins of society, clearly [Pier Paolo] Pasolini also comes to mind.
The film is set in the 1980s, but the costumes aren’t archetypal ’80s. What did you have in mind with the costumes and the rumpled white suit Arthur arrives in?
I live in the countryside, and today nobody is dressed in a way that screams 2024. Most people wear things that are 10 or 15 years old or mix and match all kinds of things. Costume designer Loredana Buscemi and I decided to convey this idea based on a very precise reconstruction of life in the ’80s in a provincial Italian town.
But we try to work on that fine line between realism and fairy tales, so the costumes also have a deeper, symbolic meaning. Arthur has this white suit that he wears throughout the seasons because he may be a ghost—he may or may not exist. Flora wears black, the color of grief, because she is missing her daughter, and the woman Arthur is looking for is a rainbow of colors.
Americans tend to have a very romanticized idea of the Italian landscape from movies and TV. Here, we see smoking factories, dilapidated mansions, and damp forests. Why did you choose to portray the landscape this way?
The landscape is another protagonist of my film—I am deeply connected to and inspired by it. The story we tell is about a gang of grave robbers, and we all agree what they’re doing is scandalous, and yet nobody seems scandalized by the violation of the landscape. Why should these people respect or consider it sacred when they see a factory built atop a temple, the woods full of trash, and toilets strewn on the seashore? I wanted to give this tragic sense of a lost beauty.
The tombaroli are just the creation of a materialistic, patriarchal society. They think it’s okay to steal and sell these things for money because it’s the only thing they have learned to do from looking at the world around them.
La Chimera is in theaters now.
