The romance of the past is buried beneath the fatalism of the present in Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera.”

Starring Josh O’Connor as Arthur, a British archaeologist turned ‘tombaroli’ grave robber, the film grapples with the spiritual mystique of the ancients, as unearthed by lost cynics of the contemporary era. 

Arthur, a recent prison parolee, is the very image of a dead man walking. The love of his life seems to have vanished into the ether, and he faces no dilemma about immediately returning to the illegal trade that presumably landed him behind bars. He spares as little thought for his own being or soul as for those of the deceased Etruscans whose tombs he pillages for profit. 

O’Connor has proven himself to be the rarified sort of modern actor: one utterly without vanity. Across what is quickly becoming one of the most impressive filmographies of his age group, he has submerged himself into roles of men whose sense of dignity is as worn down as their fraying clothes and ratty shoes. Even a whiff of errant ego could derail immersion into such non-pitiable sad sacks. That O’Connor never emits so much as a breath of narcissism ensures we are as trapped with the consequences of his shaggy schmucks as he is himself, as their interpreter. 

With “La Chimera’s” primarily pastoral setting, there is a want to assume that Rohrwacher might invoke the works of Rossellini or Pasolini; who each channeled the journey of peasant characters to some sort of spiritual transcendence. Rohrwacher’s 2018 masterpiece, “Happy as Lazzaro,” was a direct reinterpretation of Antonioni’s “Red Desert,” so it seems the director is as much an archeologist of classic Italian film as “Chimera’s” Arthur is meant to be of Etruscan forbearers. Her latest, though, most strikingly recalls the iconic Fellini. 

Beyond the obvious Felliniesque presence of a group of performers who interlude “La Chimera” with meta-musical commentary on its lead character’s exploits, Arthur himself could be drawn directly out of a work of the maestro as well. Although shabbier than Mastroianni on even his worst days, Arthur shares all the self-loathing of “8 1/2’s” Guido, or “La Dolce Vita’s” Marcello, while surrounded by a crew of delinquent enablers right out of “The Swindle.” He has talent (actually, an otherworldly one, by which he divines the locations of hidden graves), but denies the profundity of his God-given gift by meandering in a soulless cycle of sinful self-condemnation. 

Where Fellini’s men in crisis were confronted with the divinity of artistic vision and refused it by being caught up in their own prideful psyche, Arthur is surrounded by the sacredness of the ancients. He seemingly desecrates their resting places less for profit, and more out of a need for personal punishment - as in Fellini, a purgatory of modernity. It is only when he accepts the romantic fatalism of the past, that he is able to fully contextualize the death drive chasing him in the present.

Rohrwacher is, though, maybe more forgiving of Arthur than Fellini was for his self stand-in Mastroianni personas. With the unearthing of tombs comes the release of an ineffable and previously dormant divinity. It fuses onto the disoriented meandering body of the present; like the film’s title creature, a beast of many parts - beautiful less for its ramshackle figure, than for its mere existence, on love alone.