By Erik Bajzert

The first face we see in La Chimera — the latest from Italian auteur Alice Rohrwacher — belongs to a gorgeously lit and framed woman. With a playful removal of a camera lens, the woman emerges from the dark and assumes her position as the film’s De Facto Dead Girlfriend (Trademark Pending). We wonder, does she have desires or personality? Does she have any bearing on the plot beyond the male protagonist’s grief? Nope, she’s just pretty and dead.

‘Pretty and dead’ are precisely the words I’d use to describe all of La Chimera, a film that delights in a gluttony of whimsical and thematically loaded individual sequences, but ultimately falls apart under any emotional scrutiny when considering the work as a whole. Rohrwacher captures an impressive amount of moment-to-moment human zeal but forgets to write her subjects with a soulfulness that elevates their drama in any substantive way.

The film follows Arthur, a Phillip Marlowe-esque graverobber, fresh out of prison and back to illegal excavations in a poorly rendered attempt to reconnect with his dead girlfriend, about whom we know next to nothing. His dirty, white suit appears to grow filthier as the film progresses. As the film progresses, he resists his burgeoning feelings for Italia, a young mother who sees good in Arthur but knows little about his life of crime.

Arthur and Italia’s dynamic is, by far, the best part of the movie, but there isn’t enough of it. Instead, we get a litany of grave-robbing sequences that, while fun, seldom carry much weight because of Rohrwacher’s bizarre distance from her subjects. Watching our rag-tag group of criminals sing, steal, and drink together is mildly amusing but never genuinely engaging. Arthur receives little characterization beyond his ill-defined ennui, failing to elicit much care. The supporting cast is woefully constructed, each character defined only by their relationship to our lackluster protagonist. It’s easy to feel throughout La Chimera that you’re bearing witness to a party that you’re not allowed to participate in. This invitation seems reserved solely for European sadboys and their cult of personality.

Despite my many reservations, there’s much to like about the craft here, especially Helene Louvart’s frequently arresting cinematography and the central performances from Carol Duarte and an Italian-speaking Josh O’Connor.

However, when I try to connect to La Chimera emotionally, I am left disappointingly cold. Though her film captures the gluttony of beautiful images and memorable sequences from a sensory perspective, it’s a shame that their memorability begins and ends there. Rohrwacher attempts to craft a work exploring themes of grief and redemption but ends up stuffing a filmic corpse with rote whimsy instead of the usual embalming fluid. [C]