La Chimera review – Josh O’Connor dazzles in brilliant tale of Italian tomb-raiders

What a roll Josh O’Connor is on right now. Anyone who has failed to grasp his formidable range should treat themselves to a double bill of his current films: see him dangerously driven and fiercely charismatic in tennis shorts in Challengers, then follow it up with Alice Rohrwacher’s glorious Italian-language film La Chimera, and a frayed, wounded O’Connor performance that ranks among his very finest to date.

As Arthur, a renegade British archaeologist in 1980s Tuscany, O’Connor plays his character as a man adrift and disconnected from the world. In his ghostly, off-white suit, its grubby linen the colour of a recently disinterred shroud, Arthur looks like a fallen angel from a Caravaggio painting. The de facto leader, thanks to his mystical gift for divining the location of long-sealed tombs, of a rowdy and disreputable band of grave robbers, or tombaroli, Arthur reluctantly inhabits the present but is continually drawn to the past: to the distant past, and the beauty of the ancient artefacts that he hawks to collectors, and to the recent past, and an elusive time of happiness with his lost love Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello). It’s worth mentioning that the character was originally written as a man in his 40s or 50s, rather than O’Connor’s early 30s, but the pensive, rumpled, old-soul quality in O’Connor’s performance works so well that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. And after all, age, like time itself, is not a straightforward concept in La Chimera.

Time has a way of playing tricks in Rohrwacher’s films. It’s not just that the line between the past and the present is a permeable one, more that the way she envisions the structure of time, not as a conventional linear journey, but more as coexisting layers that have a way of bleeding into each other. That was true of her last film, the magical realist fable Happy As Lazzaro, with its ageless eponymous innocent blithely wandering across decades in a matter of moments. And this concept of parallel time-strata is woven into the extraordinary, beguiling La Chimera, by far her most accomplished and confident film to date. Like her previous features, which also include Corpo Celeste and The Wonders, which follows a family of beekeepers in rural Italy, La Chimera draws from her own slightly bohemian upbringing close to nature in an archeologically rich region of Tuscany (with a beekeeper for a father).

There’s something about the folkloric quality of Rohrwacher’s films, their embrace of a kind of earth magic, that prompts people to describe them as fairytales. But this is perhaps misleading. La Chimera is no twinkly escapist fantasy, it’s a film full of grit, thorns and greed. The third instalment of a loose trilogy about Italian identity, the film shows a country in which history asserts itself, but which has a careless relationship with its legacy and landscape. It’s an Italy that builds a power plant more or less on top of an Etruscan burial site; a wrecked and pillaged country in which priceless treasures are worth whatever they can fetch on the black market.

The story itself is a sinuous, slippery thing, as elusive as the chimera of the film’s title. Arthur returns to Tuscany following, it is hinted but not overtly stated, a stint in prison. He reconnects with Beniamina’s formidable mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini) in a crumbling mansion that seems to be held together by the force of Flora’s personality and little else. There he meets Italia (Carol Duarte), Flora’s singing student and general dogsbody. There’s a spark between them, gorgeously developed through Italia’s wordless tutorials in Italian hand gestures. Meanwhile, Arthur and his tombaroli – merry pranksters with grinning, mocking Pasolini-esque faces – scrape together an illicit living, until Arthur rebels against the destructive impulse to possess treasures that were never intended, as Italia tells him, “for human eyes”.

The film’s riches come from Rohrwacher’s seemingly inexhaustible wealth of ideas: the tactile, textural quality that results from dipping into different film stocks (cinematographer Hélène Louvart shoots on 35mm, Super 16mm, and 16mm); the sped-up footage that defuses the intensity of Arthur’s anger at his friends; the use of an itinerant balladeer to narrate chunks of the story. The dishevelled, impromptu quality of some of the music – there’s also a village band, honking out rough and ready carnival anthems on battered brass instruments – is strikingly contrasted with a fantastic tomb-plundering montage set to Kraftwerk’s electro-pop classic Spacelab. It’s an audacious mashup of the ancient, archaeological past and techno-futurism in one thrillingly unexpected extended sequence.

This push and pull of opposing forces is a key theme in La Chimera. Religion is pitted against paganism, in a celebration of the feast of the Epiphany which turns into a drunken, cross-dressing bacchanal. The purity of art v the taint of commerce. Life v death. And the character of Arthur is the film’s key battleground: he is pulled between his lost love (the unravelling threads from the vivid knitted dress she wears in his memories seem to tie the world of the dead and living together) and the potential of a new love.

• In UK and Irish cinemas now