Movie Review: Alice Rohrwacher’s tombaroli tale ‘La Chimera’ is pure magic

When we talk about “movie magic,” the first thing that comes to mind is often something like the bikes achieving liftoff in “E.T.” But it applies no less to Alice Rohrwacher’s wondrous “La Chimera,” a grubbily transcendent folk tale of a film that finds its enchantment buried in the ground.

“Were you dreaming?” a train conductor asks the sleeping Arthur (Josh O’Connor), a distant, temperamental Brit in Italy with little more to his name than the rumpled cream-colored linen suit he wears. The answer is yes. Radiant memories of Arthur’s dead lover, Benjamina, haunt his dreams and propel him on a strange quest into the underground tombs of Tuscany.

A melancholy spell seems to hang over Arthur, who has a mystical gift for finding ancient relics. It’s the early 1980s. Arthur is returning home from a stint in jail for grave robbing. His homecoming is received like a hero’s return by the scruffy, carnivalesque band of tombaroli — tomb raiders who plunder Etruscan artifacts — who look on Arthur more like a prince than a destitute thief. They call him “maestro.”

With remarkable precision, Arthur is able to point to where to dig. In one scene, he takes a small, bended branch as an instrument for his dowsing. “La Chimera,” itself, seems to emerge almost the same way — an earthy, spellbinding buried treasure with a sublime drawing power.

The precise moment I fell totally in love with “La Chimera” — and this is very much a movie to love — is an early montage in which Arthur and his fellow scavengers scamper across the countryside, hiding in fields from bumbling police, while a folk song about the tombarolo Englishman is sung. “La Chimera,” the third in a loose trilogy for Rohrwacher following “The Wonders” and “Happy as Lazzaro,” is the fullest realization yet of her cinema of “magical neo-realism.”

Rohrwacher’s great fascination is with the past. The hold it can have on the present. The vast yet minuscule distance between long-ago and today. “Happy as Lazzaro” charmingly walked a 19th century peasant into present day.