Death and Capitalism

La Chimera - Alice Rohrwacher (2023)

SPOILERS

How can you make sense of the tendency for accumulation in mortal beings? We know we will have to leave everything behind when we die, so why do we spend so much of our time surrounding ourselves with more and more possessions? Perhaps we are trying to insulate ourselves from our fear of death, surrounding ourselves with things that tie us to our earthly existence and create an illusion of permanence.

Set in Italy in the 1980s, La Chimera follows a young British man (Arthur) who has a supernatural knack for finding ancient tombs. He and a band of locals tramp around the countryside, liberating Etruscan grave goods that were intended for the journey into the afterlife. His companions are certainly in it for the money, but it appears that Arthur is looking for something else. He has lost someone, and he seems to believe that his gift for finding tombs might lead him to her, that he might somehow be able to connect with the afterlife through these ancient places.

Arthur is squatting in a shack near his lover's old family mansion, where her mother, Flora, still lives. In the course of the film he meets a young woman, Italia, who is similarly down on her luck. She is working as a maid in the crumbling old mansion in exchange for a place to sleep, somehow hiding the fact that she has her two young children living with her. They are interested in each other, and a romance is blossoming but when Italia finds out what Arthur does, she is disgusted. There is something questionable in stealing from the dead, like we are trampling on their last wishes, on their beliefs.

Arthur meets Italia again when she has been chucked out of the mansion and taken up in the town's old abandoned train station building. She has started some sort of communal living space with other women and their children. Perhaps Arthur could stay with her, stop his ceaseless wandering and find something resembling a community, something resembling a home? But the pull of his former lover is too great, the obsession with finding what he once had and has now lost too intoxicating.

This is the world that we live in under capitalism, ever striving for something unattainable, always wanting. A chimera is a mythical creature, but it can also refer to an unrealizable dream, something unattainable. Whether that is longing for those who have gone, attempting to escape our own inevitable end, or wishing we could take things with us to the next life, it stops us from sharing with and loving those who are alive and right in front of us.