An Italian director on her own wavelength didn’t seek out the limelight it found her
Esther Zuckerman March 29, 2024
When
the
actor Josh O’Connor first saw a film by director Alice Rohrwacher
, it was
her 2018 feature “Happy as Lazzaro,”
it the experience
was
a
revelatory
experience
. “It was as if I’d gone into the cinema and
I
found someone who was everything I’d ever wanted from a film,” he sa
ysid
.
O’Connor was so enchanted by
the his
experience of “Lazzaro,” the story of a farm worker who befriends the son of
the a
rich landowner and then travels through time, that the actor best known for “The Crown” set out on a mission to contact Rohrwacher. It
wasn’tnot
an easy task. Despite being one of the most celebrated Italian filmmakers working today,
she is not Rohrwacher isn’t readilyeasily
accessible. In fact, at one point he just addressed a letter to her hometown of Orvieto, Italy
,
hoping it would reach her. It likely didn’t.
Eventually, according to Rohrwacher, one of O’Connor’s missives
arrived atreached
her parents’ honey farm. That planted an idea. Rohrwacher had been looking for someone to star in her upcoming film
,
“La Chimera
,
”
(
out this weekend in limited release
)
. O’Connor’s attempts to contact her were
fated destined to bear fruit
. He now plays Arthur, an Englishman in 1980s Italy with a mysterious gift for finding Etruscan tombs, which he and his crew then rob
,and selling the purloined artifacts
to
an
antiquities dealer
s
.
O’Connor’s pursuit of Rohrwacher is a situation that feels apropos to her films,
which are
imbued with an intoxicating magic in which reality and fantasy
somehow
combine
together
. Blending music and mythos, her work seems to
reach across
span eras,
realms and stylesthrough time
. Indeed,
she the director
describe
sd
“La Chimera,” in which Arthur seems to be seeking something more
than
buried treasure as he mourns the death of his lover,
Beniamina,
as about “the beyond.”
“There is, of course, this tragic core to my films but they are filled also with a lot of life, a lot of adventure,
a
lot of things happening,”
she
sa
id ys Rohrwacher, 42,
speaking on a video call through a translator. “
I would say there are these two elements:
Not tragic as much as a lot of life there.”
Ensconced in an editing studio where she’s working on a short, Rohrwacher speaks with passion in long phrases, having to pause at times so the translator can keep up.
While
she’s s s
till
perhaps
underrated on American shores, Rohrwacher has won over a lot of
high-
profile fans beyond
just
O’Connor.
Alfonso Cuarn,T t
he Oscar-winning director of “Roma,”
Alfonso Cuarn,
saw her semi-autobiographical 2014 feature “The Wonders , “ about a young girl’s coming of age amid a family of beekeepers
,
and became, as he
tells The Times viawrote in an
email, “enamored by the films poetry and generosity.” Cuarn went about recruiting Rohrwacher to make the short film that
would
bec
ao
me
the 2022’s
Oscar-nominated “Le Pupille,” a WWII-set tale about the whims of girls at
aCatholic
boarding school.
“I believe Alice to be one of the most important filmmakers working today,”
he says,
“one that, while working with very grounded characters, invites us to dwell though the sensuality of her images into what is intangible, reaching the highest levels of mythical resonance.
,
”
Cuarn wrotesays.
Isabella Rossellini, who plays the mother of Arthur’s lost love in “La Chimera,” compare
sd
Rohrwacher to her father, the late
Italian
auteur Roberto Rosselini
of “Rome, Open City” and “Paisan,” among others.
“I do see my father’s film [and] Fellini,” Rosselini sa
ysid
. “I’m moved by that. I’m moved that a generation can absorb it and not copy it or do the same style
,
but absorb it and take it further.
Indeed,
Rohrwacher cite
sd Roberto
Rosselini as one of the filmmakers
whothat
sparked her interest in cinema,
and
explain
inged
that it’s no accident that
Isabella his daughter
ended up in “La Chimera.”
However, But,
she add
sed
, “I never would have thought that after meeting her I would end up loving her more than her father
,
actually.”
Despite her early affection for Rosselini’s films, Rohrwacher, who studied literature and philosophy at
the University of Turinin university
, sa
ysid
she approached filmmaking from
the
“outside
of cinema
.” At a certain point
,however
, she realized that cinema was a “summation” of everything she loved painting, theater, music, human beings. (There is often singing in her films:
In
“La Chimera
,
”
showcases
a group of troubadours
sing performing
a ballad about the characters that interrupts the action; “Le Pupille” has a chorus of girls
.
)
Rohrwacher’s roots are crucial to her art. She still lives in the Umbria region
in a town called Cast elle Giorgio,
near where she grew up,
in
a town called Cast
l
e
l
Giorgio. Her sister Alba
,
is an
actoractress
who has appeared in all Rohrwacher’s features except for her debut, 2011’s “Corpo Celeste,” about a girl’s immersion into Catholicism.
(Both siblings have also worked on episodes of HBO’s
)
In “The Wonders,” Alba play
sed
a version of their mother, loving and frustrated with her gruff husband, who employs their children as labor in their honey business.
Rohrwacher’s connection to the past her own and that of the place she still resides
is
evident in the stories she
consistently
chooses to tell. “All my movies actually come from a long
long
time ago,” she sa
ysid.
.
“The nutshell that starts the idea for a film actually dates back to a long time ago.,” she says.
The
sagas stories
of the
“T t
ombaroli,
“
the grave robbers who populate “La Chimera,” were ones she knew from childhood, as well as
talesthe narratives
about the trafficking of illegal artifacts. Although these ideas had been swirling in her head for years, she decided to revisit the material during the pandemic. “I wanted to reflect on our collective relationship with death,” the filmmaker says
she said
, “
We all have this very strong connection with death and I thought that this would be a good angle to explore through the film,
not just [through] the grave robbers and
the
arch
a
eological theft, per se, but actually what you can find about our relationship with loss and with those who are no longer there.”
She thinks of “La Chimera” as a “vertical journey through time,” as opposed to the horizontal one that her hero in “Lazzaro” takes when he suddenly wakes up in the future after a great fall. In “La Chimera,” below the ground there are not only remnants of a long
–
dead civilization, but also Arthur’s suppressed grief.
“‘La Chimera’ is like a
troubadour song, a
treasure hunt for what is gone,” Cuarn
wrote writes
. “Our longing to recover vanished memories, objects and love can only result in scattered fragments of what is lost.”
While the film is literally about arch
a
eology, Rohrwacher also wanted to be archaeological in how she depicted the events on screen,
using older film stocks such as
16mm and 35mm
film stock
while working with her regular cinematographer Hlne Louvart. “I wanted to show the variety of formats that have characterized the history of cinema because I think that for young people that is very important,” Rohrwacher sa
ysid
.
She wants to highlight the tangible aspects of cinema, not just the “great auteurs.”
The materials of cinema are just as crucial to her as the
famous
names.
“We have this expression in Italian, it’s like being soulmates, ‘two bodies one soul,’ and that is what it’s all about,” she said.
O’Connor liken
sed
the experience of stepping onto a Rohrwacher set
like as
being inside the film itself. “It’s so special and ethereal,” he said. “Her world is like magical realism in itself.” Most of the cast members, he sa
ysid
, are people from her town
,
who are not actors. During the shoot, O’Connor lived in a camper van that was parked in the garden of one of Rohrwacher’s friends.
“She works with a lot of friends,” Rossellini
sayssaid
. “It’s a lot of people that are living next to her farm or work with her father. There is great camaraderie.”
The actor already thinks
of
Rohrwacherhough comparisons to Rossellini’s father abound, Rossellini herself also compares her to another Italian master: Federico Fellini. Sheis
as “somebody that can really mark Italian cinema.
,
”
Rossellini believes.said.For a
As much as Rohrwacher’s films dig into history personal
, that of the land she was raised on,
or otherwise she is interested in moving her medium forward, creating the kind of pictures that linger long after her audience leaves the theater.
“Maybe my films are not perfect
;
maybe
the perfect film,
a machine could do that
,
, but that’s not what I’m after,” she said. “What I’m after is making films that are alive
,
and that are full of life and that constantly have something new to show you, something new to tell, and indeed you can watch them over and
over
again and there’s always something, some kind of life that comes to you from the movie.”
She’s
added that she was
talking more as a “spectator than a director,”
she says,
but watching a Rohrwacher film and speaking to her are almost one
andin
the same, per her collaborators.
According to Cuarn
:
, “Its rare to meet a filmmaker that completely embodies as a person the essence of their films
a
. And Alice is like that.”
