In December 2023 I had hopes of watching La Chimera, the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s latest feature, but it was playing only at Linden Boulevard Multiplex in East New York, a longish subway-and-bus ride from my apartment in Queens. It ran for just a week and then vanished. Why only there, I wondered, and would it ever reappear, or was it as chimerical as its name? (Later I learned that it could not be considered for an Academy Award without a brief theatrical run, though in the end Italy submitted a different film.) There was a wider US release last March, but La Chimera’s initial fleeting holiday-season presence at a commercial multiplex more accustomed to screening Hollywood blockbusters, in an area with a higher poverty rate than most of New York City, especially as that cinema permanently shut down a few weeks later (leaving residents without a nearby movie theater of any kind), felt oddly appropriate for Rohrwacher, whose films often focus on incongruous moments of enchantment within communities living at the margins of society—in industrial suburbs, on isolated farms, beside disused railway tracks, and in other places not claimed by the prosperous.

“I feel it’s my duty to tell the story not of an individual but of a community,” she has said of her films. These amount to four features, six shorts, and four documentary segments released over the last eighteen years, and in most of them she is preoccupied with the economic and social inheritances of present-day Italy. Her films have been set as far back as World War II, but she tends to favor the 1990s. Flip phones and Walkmans are spotted more often than iPhones. (She was born in 1981.) She is drawn to microcosms—Catholic confirmation classes (Heavenly Body), a hive of anticapitalist beekeepers (The Wonders), a group of exploited sharecroppers (Happy as Lazzaro), or a band of thieves who loot ancient Etruscan tombs (La Chimera)—that can dramatize larger structures of power.

Her style has been called a blend of neorealism and magic realism, but this doesn’t quite get to the heart of it. Mythic and fantastical elements crop up, but they are lightly handled. Some of her movies (such as Heavenly Body and The Wonders) don’t have anything supernatural in them. She uses a blend of nonprofessional and professional actors, while her documentary ethos is combined with formal experimentation, playful humor, a puncturing of self-seriousness, and an abiding interest in spiritual mysteries (meaning, for her, the imagination stimulated by what is unknown). What one feels most in her films is a sense of freedom in where the story might go, in her variety of production choices, and in her ability to create such a concrete sense of reality—the impression that these are real lives, real people—despite frequently undermining that solidity. How she manages to do that is the magical part of her realism.

In spite of her stated emphasis on community, Rohrwacher does not disregard the individual. At the center of all her features is a misfit character who doesn’t fully belong to the group. Telling the story of an individual, particularly an individual at odds with the clan, can be an effective way of illuminating a wider situation, and her first two features do this well, with unflinching looks at, respectively, religious hypocrisy (Heavenly Body) and commercialization (The Wonders) through a teenage girl’s eyes.

Heavenly Body (2011) follows thirteen-year-old Marta, newly moved from Switzerland to an industrial suburb in Reggio Calabria at the toe of Italy, who attends catechism classes but finds her place outside the church after discovering its leaders to be morally inadequate guides. (In the final scene, in a kind of secular baptism, Marta wades through a flooded underpass toward an urban beach strewn with broken furniture and other garbage, which has been mysteriously arranged—out of an artistic impulse? as a symbolic new home?—by some boys she’d previously observed from a distance; the inference is that she has found her people.) The Wonders (2014), Rohrwacher’s second feature, centers on Gelsomina, the quietly rebellious daughter of a family of struggling beekeepers, who longs to broaden and poeticize her prosaic world. Seduced by the princess-like beauty of a TV host (Monica Bellucci in a platinum wig and robe meant to imply an ancient Etruscan goddess), Gelsomina secretly enters her family in a reality TV show called Countryside Wonders. It offers a large cash prize to the most “traditional” of the local farmers, many of whom still, in the words of the show, live “like once upon a time.”

Gelsomina’s overbearing father abhors the idea of pandering in ridiculous pseudo-Etruscan costumes for much-needed money—he wants to believe that “certain things can’t be bought,” such as one’s dignity—but the family ends up participating in the spectacle. They lose after Gelsomina’s father gets stage fright, but Gelsomina personally triumphs by performing a marvel on camera. Accompanied by the eerie whistling of an otherwise mute, delinquent boy she likes (her family is being paid to house him), she holds two bees in her closed mouth, and when she parts her lips they crawl over her face without stinging her. This bee charming impresses others at the taping, redeems her father’s bad performance, and supplies the show with a rare moment of ancient “magic”; you sense that, after this, she’s going to wield more power over her life in general.

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Rohrwacher’s first two features are essentially coming-of-age stories, despite the careful and tactile presentation (in Heavenly Body) of an economically depressed area in thrall to self-serving religious leaders and the depiction (in The Wonders) of a small bee farm unable to survive in the modern economy. Both girls become disappointed with what they had perhaps hoped to find mystically meaningful, and both end the film feeling more autonomous and better able to resist small tyrannies.

We watch events unfold mostly through the eyes of the two girls, in sympathy with them. But Rohrwacher distrusts the modern emphasis on personality, where one’s private identity “seems to be the focus and the center of everything.” As if portraying a person’s inner world could occlude the outer one, she wants to get inside a social organism, not a brain. As a result, her two more recent features have dollied us away from the individual perspective. Instead of observing the world through the eyes of the main character, the films operate at more of a distance, documenting a community’s reaction to an enigmatic oddball: Lazzaro in Happy as Lazzaro (2018) and Arthur in La Chimera. These characters operate more like cogs of destiny than as beings who can influence the plot or the world.

Unlike the girls in the earlier films, Lazzaro—a sweet-natured and simple-minded teenage boy—doesn’t have a coming-of-age experience: miraculously, he doesn’t age at all, remaining unchanged while everyone else gets older by twenty-odd years. Living in an isolated central Italian community of farmworkers who have for years been tricked into toiling as modern feudal peasants, Lazzaro is in turn exploited by his fellow laborers, who allot him the chores they don’t want. He seems truly content to work twice as hard as everyone else, and gazes at people with the wide-eyed innocence and devotion of a child, though without a child’s self-interest.

He’s what people used to call touched—in this case by God, since it eventually becomes clear that he resembles a saint, and like many saints he’s a cipher whose life makes sense to other people only when he’s dead. He reflects others like a mirror or (as in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar) a donkey: how they treat him magnifies their image. When most people encounter his inscrutable goodness, they can’t celebrate it; they must abuse it and so take advantage of him or laugh at his naiveté or misconstrue his actions, while he remains, until a critical moment, immune to harm. At first Lazzaro seems ripe for loss of innocence and unsaintly inner growth, but he was born finished, the type of saint who doesn’t need to grow up. He operates on a different plane of existence from everyone around him.

It’s notable that this largely static character in Happy as Lazzaro does not add much when it comes to delineating the social organism. The Wonders, despite its more familiar presentation of character, is just as successful at showing us systemic inequality and the struggles of those trapped within fixed orbits. Rohrwacher’s attempt to retreat from personality—devaluing, to some extent, a psychological approach—isn’t what facilitates her connection to the larger picture. What roots her films so effectively, allowing them to branch into a wider world, is the documentary lengths she goes to in creating the specialized minisocieties (fictional but inspired by fact) in which her misfits live.

Like Agnès Varda, another filmmaker known for her mélange of documentary and fiction, seriousness and playfulness, Rohrwacher grew up without watching many films. Born in Fiesole, site of one of the earliest Etruscan settlements, she spent her youth on a bee farm managed by her German father, in her mother’s native Umbrian village of Castel Giorgio. The beekeeping family in The Wonders is not a replica of her own, but the film shows, Rohrwacher has said, “a world that’s very close to the world my family lived in.” The town didn’t have a movie theater, but there was a tiny TV with a VHS player at the local library, and she recalls avidly watching the Indiana Jones films with a group of children, which inspired her to dig up pieces of ancient artifacts in the fields, not hard to unearth in a place so layered with history. As a child, she wanted to run away and join the circus; instead, after studying classics at the University of Turin and screenwriting at Turin’s Holden School, she partnered with a friend, Pier Paolo Giarolo, to make a documentary about a traveling circus.

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In Un piccolo spettacolo (A Little Show, 2005), on which she is credited as cowriter, coeditor, and photographer, the influence of her childhood is already evident. The documentary follows a family of nomadic performers who plod from town to town in horse-drawn caravans as cars whiz by, an old way of life juxtaposed with the new. Despite its subject matter, it is the opposite of Felliniesque, antispectacle in its workaday observation of the couple and their children and animals but containing hints of wonder in the way it records, without glamour, a difficult but rewarding way of life: artistic, committed, self-directed, and antiestablishment. It also reflects Rohrwacher’s identification with the outsider; despite being born in Italy, she has felt “always perceived as a foreigner” because of her half-German heritage.

Working on the film made Rohrwacher realize that she wasn’t interested in straight documentary: she wanted more freedom to invent. Part of that invention meant writing a full script (dialogue is not improvised in her films), and part of it meant letting reality grow. For The Wonders, her production team made all the honey. While securing funding for Heavenly Body, Rohrwacher was able to wait for her preferred nonprofessional actress (a prepubescent girl she’d found on a hippie commune) to have a growth spurt and look the age of the character she wanted her to play. For Happy as Lazzaro, filmed in rural Umbria, Rohrwacher hired local farmers to plant a tobacco crop and used both the crop and the farmers to represent the community of Inviolata, a place loosely based on an actual one from the 1980s where a remote band of farm laborers had been led to believe that they and their uneducated children “belonged” to the landowner. In her unhurried approach to set design, entwining life with art, Rohrwacher also insisted on using wild animals in the film:

In the first part of Lazzaro there are these animals scattered around…. We took them there when they were very little, and that’s where they grew up, in Inviolata….

Of course when we were looking for a wolf it was difficult because we tried with a fake wolf in the beginning, a dog, but this dog does nothing, it’s just there…. So we found a one-hundred-percent real wolf, and it was very beautiful and very difficult to shoot.

The real creatures of Rohrwacher’s cinema might exist in real gardens, but she works equally hard to make her artifice visible. In La Chimera, even more than in her previous films, Rohrwacher inclines toward self-conscious detachment. Working with her recurring collaborator Hélène Louvart, a veteran French cinematographer, she juggles a variety of different stocks, including 35mm, Super 16mm, and 16mm—the latter “used with a small workaday camera, like pencil scribbles made in the margins”—to scratchily remind us that we’re watching a film. Her reasons become clear as the movie goes on.

Rohrwacher likes to start by keeping the audience in the dark. As with her three earlier features, La Chimera begins with flashlight-like glimpses of activity that tip us into a disorienting temporary limbo. Here the introductory time of darkness has shortened, perhaps because the whole film has one foot in the grave: it’s about a group of Italian tombaroli (tomb robbers) who—like their real counterparts in the 1980s—loot ancient tombs and sell the artifacts to black-market art dealers. The gang’s secret weapon is Arthur, a disheveled, cream-suited Englishman and former archaeologist (played by Josh O’Connor) who is blessed and cursed with the power of divination, using a forked branch and visions to find these two-thousand-year-old Etruscan burial sites.

When the film opens, Arthur is fresh out of prison for selling antiquities and preoccupied with finding a different kind of lost treasure, his former girlfriend Beniamina. And yet according to everyone other than Arthur and Beniamina’s mother, Flora (played by Isabella Rossellini), Beniamina is dead. She is the one we catch sight of in the opening moments of the film: after some darkness and sounds of nature—chirring, hooting, rustling—part of the screen fills with a young sunlit woman peeking at the camera (“So it’s you, my last woman’s face,” says Arthur’s voice, in English) while the rest of the screen remains dark, as if half covered by a lens cap.

A click, darkness, another peek, more darkness, and soon we realize that Arthur is dreaming of his lost beloved while he sleeps on a sunlit train, teasingly observed by three young women—with faces and profiles Arthur later calls ancient, by which he means Etruscan—who sit in his compartment with the air of mythical beings, a sense of prehistory alive in the present. They are scared away when Arthur, woken up by the conductor and provoked by a jokey traveling salesman, lashes out and punches the man for making fun of his unwashed clothing.

One thing is clear from the outset: our sympathy for the central misfit will have to be more circumspect than it was in previous films. Arthur is profoundly uncomfortable with himself and his life; O’Connor plays him like a prickly cat twisting away from human contact. On one level, Arthur is the ex-con drawn back into pulling off more jobs, a character familiar to film noir; on another, he’s the walking dead. We follow him as he returns home to a shack clinging to the outer wall of a steep hilltop town (emblematic of his slipping hold on the world) and goes to visit the elderly, wheelchair-bound Flora in her villa, where he meets her live-in “student,” Italia. Played by the Brazilian actress Carol Duarte, Italia speaks Portuguese to her two children; her allegorical name is perhaps meant to remind us that Italy is home to all kinds of people, including immigrants (like Rohrwacher’s father, or like early Romans themselves). She works, ineptly, as Flora’s housekeeper in exchange for room and board and some token singing lessons; her employer, meanwhile, does not realize that Italia is secretly housing her children in the villa. Italia is interested in the emotionally distant Arthur but becomes repelled—as Italy itself might be—when she finds out that he and his associates are desecrating ancient tombs.

Soon Arthur too finds himself horrified (while underground, in a wrenching scene set in a perfectly preserved shrine) by the way his fellow tombaroli decapitate the statue of a beautiful Etruscan goddess to remove it from the place. This severed head sets in motion a series of actions that seal his fate—or rather actions that continue to write his fate, since his fate has been plotted from the first scene in the train compartment, where there are not one but two images of women’s profiles: one a noseless graffito and the other a Leonardo da Vinci reproduction tacked to the window, the latter hiding Arthur’s head for a moment when he punches the salesman.

They’re fleeting glimpses, easy to miss—characteristic of Rohrwacher’s lavishly understated attention to detail, the meanings of which remain dormant until you rewatch her films. Like the severed head of the statue, these drawings are refracted visions of Beniamina, the only thing on Arthur’s mind. He has done his time in prison and has also, it is implied, done his time on earth: what he is searching for, without realizing it, is a door to the underworld. Throughout the film he dreams repeatedly of a red thread unraveling from Beniamina’s knitted dress; it’s the thread that will lead Arthur, Theseus-like, out of life’s confusing maze and turn him into an Orpheus who gets to keep—or rather who gets kept by—his Eurydice.

Visual allusions to moments from film history—Italian and otherwise—abound. To pick only a few examples, the statue of the Etruscan goddess, dangling from a crane as it’s lowered into a shipping container, recalls the statue of Jesus that swings from a helicopter as it flies over Rome in the opening scenes of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960); the way the frescoes instantly fade when fresh oxygen enters the shrine echoes a similar moment in another Fellini film, Roma (1972); the power plants that crowd Italy’s shoreline evoke the sinister beauty of Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964). Isabella Rossellini is herself a reminder of her father, Roberto Rossellini, whose neorealist presence hovers over the film. During a moment of song, when the tombaroli are shown running away from police, the footage is sped up in a slapstick Keystone Cops manner, channeling the silent era.

As the allusions and aspect ratios multiply, it becomes clear that Rohrwacher is creating her own tomb of cinematic relics, reminding us that she too is looting the past. The film’s elliptical and fragmented style, where much is left unsaid, is meant to be something we piece together, like the shards of an artifact. Written during the Covid-19 lockdown, it’s a movie permeated with death and loss—of the cultures that preceded ours and, eventually, of our own. What will be left, it wonders? And what should be preserved? When the tombaroli are digging and hammering aboveground as they try to break into an ancient tomb, the camera waits inside the buried shrine with the statues and the figurines. We hold our breath, listening with trepidation to the banging going on above, as if the future were hammering on us too.

Interspersed with these breath-holding seconds of absorption are other, more distancing moments. A minor character, suddenly finding herself alone in the middle of a sentence, breaks the fourth wall to finish her speech about how her aunt believes that “if the [supposedly matriarchal] Etruscans had still been here, there wouldn’t be all this machismo in Italy.” (Perhaps true, but the irony, which we discover later, is that her aunt is an unscrupulous black-market art dealer.) Interrupting the story with an aside to the audience seems intended here in its standard Brechtian way, encouraging us to step back from the illusion of the film, and by extension from the supposed truths of our own reality, to reflect on the larger picture. Here the larger picture is not only the specter of annihilation; it’s also the commodification of everything, and of art in particular.

Even the tombaroli step back from their thieving to sit and listen as one of them sings a ballad called “The Adventures of Arthur the Dowser.” One expects to hear the song mythologize Arthur as Robin Hood within their band of merry thieves, but the balladeer takes a more balanced approach, at times sounding like a grad student reflecting on things like “the anxiety of profit.” He sees the tombaroli for what they are, “a drop in the ocean” of people, including the black-market dealers and rich collectors who, through poverty or greed, live in an entirely materialistic way, “alienated from the sacred and the profane,” in thrall only to the god of money.

These moments, like footnotes, can sometimes point a little too hard at themselves. But more often a scene will feel true to life despite (or because of) its artificiality. At one point while Arthur is dowsing, the perspective of the camera slowly and smoothly shifts so that the scene turns upside down, as if the world under the earth had too much pull for him. He gimbals to a different equilibrium, tipping the whole film over, an inversion that feels visually and emotionally right.

What would a better future for these characters, and for us, entail? Arthur might be lost for good, but Italia, after being fired, manages to organize a communal squatters’ home with other single mothers and their children in an abandoned rural train station. It’s a work in progress (the matriarchal paradise is infested with lice) but there’s a feeling of freedom and pleasure in their collective effort.

What Rohrwacher finds “most beautiful” about making a film is that it’s “one of the few jobs that is a collective work”—like a traveling circus or the beehives of her childhood. In film after film, she collaborates closely with many of the same people (including her sister, the actress Alba Rohrwacher), creating an environment that, according to O’Connor, feels more like “discovery” than work. The key to Rohrwacher’s sensibility is her use of the word “job” rather than “art” to describe filmmaking. “When I made Happy as Lazzaro,” she has said,

I was mainly working with the local farmers and they had other things to do. They had to keep going off to plough the fields and I had to try to explain that the film was just as important. They’d say, “Oh, I can’t come tomorrow, I’ve got work to do.” And I’d say, “But you have to. This is work.”

It’s an outmoded notion, the idea that making art—particularly art that demands contemplation—matters as much as “work” work, or as much as activism. The loss of this feeling plagues some artists themselves, who worry about time squandered in the studio or who transform their art into activism. Perhaps some of the weight of Rohrwacher’s films comes from her belief that the shared artistic effort vitally matters—as much as plowing, even. What is getting reenchanted here is not a stone or a tree but the labor of art-making itself.