La Chimera Film File

Rohrwacher shoots this world in two registers. The sun-drenched surface—full of squabbling thieves, pasta dinners, and a chorus of middle-aged women singing off-key—is rendered in warm, grainy 16mm. It is chaotic, earthy, and alive. But when Arthur dips his rod and feels the pull of a buried chamber, the film cuts to 35mm, and the colors bleed into dream. The subterranean world is quiet, solemn, and full of the dead. Rohrwacher does not moralize about the grave robbing; she treats the tombs as libraries, and the tombaroli as illiterate poets who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

The film’s secret weapon is its third act, which shifts the setting from the men’s tunnels to the women’s world. Here, we meet Italia (Carol Duarte), the pregnant, practical sister of Beniamina, and Flora (Isabella Rossellini), an imperious former opera singer who runs a ramshackle music school out of her crumbling villa. Where the men steal to possess, the women build to sustain. The final sequence, a breathtaking, vertiginous journey through a necropolis that connects the past to the present, is not a treasure hunt. It is a funeral procession. La Chimera Film

It is a strange, beautiful, and devastating film—a folk tale about capitalism, colonialism, and heartbreak, where the real treasure is the permission to stop digging. Rohrwacher shoots this world in two registers