Festival de Cannes 2023, La Chimera

©YesICannes.com

The Cannes Film Festival 2023 competition closes with Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera and Ken Loach’s The Old Oak.

Ken Loach & his wife ©YesICannes.com

Festival de Cannes 2023 : the competition came to a close with Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera, who, after Les Merveilles and Heureux comme Lazzaro, brings to a close a trilogy focusing on the margins of contemporary Italy with a film that evokes Italy’s prestigious Etruscan past. The Old Oak is the fourteenth film in competition for Ken Loach, twice winner of the Palme d’Or with The Wind Rises (2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016). At 86, the filmmaker continues to denounce the infernal cynicism of British governments.

The Old Oak ©Joss Barratt – Sixteen Films

The Old Oak, an abandoned region

The Old Oak is a pub in a small village in the north of England, the last refuge for idle regulars disillusioned by the hardships the region has endured over the last few decades. The arrival of Syrian refugees creates tensions in the village, but pub owner TJ (Dave Turner) befriends Yara (Ebla Mari), a young migrant with a passion for photography. With courage and determination in the face of current adversity, together they try to breathe new life into the local community by developing a canteen for the most disadvantaged, whatever their origins. The Old Oak is about local people’s resistance to exploitation and attacks, inflicted first by the former mine owners and more recently by Margaret Thatcher and the forced closure of the mines. Although many communities are experiencing great hardship, this story offers much hope.

La Chimera ©Ad Vitam

The Chimera of the Tombaroli

Arthur (Josh O’Connor) is English, passionate about archaeology, and possesses the psychic gift – the chimera – of discovering the treasures hidden underground. The Etruscan tombs give him an uneasy feeling when he sets foot above one of these cavities that seem to abound in Etruria, the ancient Etruscan territory. He is the kingpin of a clan of tombaroli, grave robbers who believe themselves to be strangers to 2,000 years of history and dream they are free, when in fact they are just cogs in a lucrative international art trade.

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Ransacking thousand-year-old tombs

In a light-hearted atmosphere, in the course of their adventures with the shovel, they ransack thousand-year-old tombs, collect everyday Etruscan objects while playing cat and mouse with the carabinieri. Otherwise, they sing and dance while waiting for Arthur, who is attracted to Italia (Carol Duarte), Flora’s (Isabella Rossellini) housekeeper/apprentice singer, to one day fall ill on a tomb containing one of those legendary treasures that will make them all rich. Which happens soon.

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A collective history

Italian director Alice Rohrwacher has already presented Les Merveilles (Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014) and Heureux comme Lazzaro (Screenplay Prize in 2018) on the Croisette. In her elaboration of La Chimera, Etruscan remains symbolise the existence of past lives that nurtured her childhood and defined her outlook. “My individual story was part of a collective story,” she says. But while her film has the merit of showing us a refreshing Italy on the fringes, far from mobile phones and computers, it takes on the dimension of a modern tale, but… a little too chimeric.