On the impossible dream

on the impossible dream

I watched La Chimera earlier this year and haven’t stopped wondering what my chimera is, 2025 slipping in view. But I both have and lack a chimera because that’s the nature of one — an impossible dream (translated from Italian).

Speaking in the sense of sleep, all dreams are possible. There’s nothing outside of our reach. We all know this to be true. In dreams, we can be more like that which we consciously know we can be.

But to have a dream in the waking hours — therein lies the problem. Everything possible is subverted and forced into chance dictated by effort and luck. La Chimera exists in the distance between the two realms of dreams and plays with what is possible and happening.

Director Alice Rohrwacher talked about intertwining her interests — Greek mythology, literature, religion — in a Q&A at Lincoln Center following a screening of the film. Her feature films, including Happy as Lazzaro, take an almost ethnographic approach to storytelling, which is fitting as she began her directing career by way of documentary filmmaking. Rohrwacher said she quickly began writing fiction and movies with elements of magical realism when she determined filming people’s lives was “painful” for her, a “violent act.” She decided to allow people to be someone else, she said. Her background gives her films a lived-in and nostalgic feel, but from a distance — in La Chimera, it’s as if we’re voyeurs peering in on Arthur’s life.

We know little about our main character, Arthur: In the opening scenes, teenage girls in his train car ask him where he’s from and his occupation, but he cannot answer before being interrupted by a man selling goods and snacks — who he mildly assaults for the man’s annoyance. The girls leave their seats near him in reasonable disgust, and much of the movie remains just as abruptly uninformative.

Arthur returns to his friends, a band of tomb raiders — “tombaroli.” The seven make money on stolen Etruscan wonders after Arthur uses a dowsing stick to locate the graves they dig. We understand Arthur is gentle, as he delicately pieces pottery together in various scenes, shines it, and gazes at its beauty, unlike his counterparts.

The film juxtaposes belongings as extensions of those buried in the looted tombs well with its living characters. Beniamina’s disappearance and supposed death parallel Arthur’s seeing the artifacts he steals as bridges to the dead, ways to honor them in life.

Slipped between Arthur’s escapades are flirtatious scenes of him and Italia, a tone-deaf vocal student of his dead girlfriend’s mother (keep with me). At the same time, flashes of the woman he continues to pine after and a red string unraveling from her dress thread the movie together (I promise that’s as complicated as it gets). Despite all this, the viewer is still left out of the loop.

In the film, finding Beniamina is a peripheral pursuit for Arthur, unlike Beniamina’s mother, who staunchly believes in her daughter’s return. Her dedication to that belief is her primary role in the film.

Arthur’s quest to find Beniamina rings back to the Man of La Mancha (1972) as Peter O'Toole sings the “Impossible Dream”: “This is my quest, to follow that star / no matter how hopeless / no matter how far / to fight for the right without question or pause / to be willing to march into Hell for a heavenly cause.” La Chimera is adapted from Man of La Mancha and Don Quixote: all suffering and death.

Throughout La Chimera, Arthur comes across as vastly untethered to the viewer. He doesn’t share his life with Italia or anyone else and fixates on Beniamina unfailingly. The Self is unknown and in constant question, unattached to the innate meaning of objects. Although Arthur cares deeply about the items he finds, we still understand that he struggles to decide whether or not he wants to stop robbing altogether. As the film progresses, it is clear he refuses the lifestyle. But, this was foreshadowed in the first scenes when he avoided the tombaroli. “There are honest ways to get by,” I imagine Arthur tells himself.

Each artifact unearthed by the robbers is laden with history, a physical manifestation of both truth and fantasy. All the objects, like those in Lazzaro, feel recently lost and as though they still belong to their deceased owner. In a sense, you’re passing a soul around. A scene on a train solidifies this as Arthur meets people he has encountered throughout the film. They ask him for specific belongings from their graves and say, “Have you seen it?”

Italia insists that some things simply “weren’t for human eyes.” This notion lingers as Beniamina is Arthur’s most significant and perhaps sole chimera. La Chimera is a reflection of truths and impossible dreams, which lie in the meaning and physicality of the artifacts the robbers find. I need not take “truth” so literally. It doesn’t always have to be about actions; it can be about the meaning of an object.

Italia speaks of an abandoned train station she repurposed into a shelter for women and children, claiming it “didn’t belong to anyone, or it belonged to everyone.” Here lies a poignant commentary on the reclaiming of a place society discarded. It all does come down to seeing potential.

This exploration of 'truth' becomes complicated. It is not merely about actions or justifications; it delves into the significance imbued in objects. There’s an underlying desire to grasp something deeper — a need to perceive a soul.

Phil Klay wrote in Artists and Activists Both Have a Role. But Not the Same One, “The activist’s job is activism, and the artist’s job is truth.”

Although, George Oppen once said “There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art.” He would later write, “and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning.”

What do you think about the significance of art?