NZIFF: La Chimera

Set in 80s Tuscany, Alice Rohrwacher’s enchanting new film stars The Crown’s Josh O’Connor as a lovelorn Englishman who teams with an eccentric gang of grave-robbers to plunder ancient Etruscan artefacts.

“Alice Rohrwacher’s new film is a beguiling fantasy-comedy of lost love: garrulous, uproarious and celebratory in her absolutely distinctive style.
The setting is 1980s Tuscany, and Josh O’Connor is tremendous as Arthur, a dishevelled Englishman in a grubby white suit sporting a perennial cigarette. He is a former archaeological scholar who has assumed the morose, slouching gait and coiled style of a gangster… Using a dowsing rod, Arthur can tell where invaluable Etruscan antiquities are buried and has teamed up with a bizarre homeless gang of graverobbers to dig them out under cover of darkness.” — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Rated M