Asakiyume mita

mallorys_camera put me onto La Chimera, the story of a haunted English archaeologist working with a gang of small-time Italian tomb robbers (tombaroli), digging up Etruscan artifacts and selling them to Spartaco, an mysterious black-market art dealer. It was so moving--I saw it alone first (but not quite alone: I took the photo I have on my desk of Lloyd Alexander and showed him the last few minutes of it, because I knew, knew, knew that he would understand and love the ending ). Then I got wakanomori to watch it with me, then I put my dad onto it.

mallorys_camera speaks about the film beautifully here, but the line I want to seize on in what she writes is this:

Its sense of place is strong as is its sense of temporal duality, a feeling that the past is so strong, nothing is there to stop it from consuming the present.

The dead and the living are equally present. Arthur, the Englishman, is balanced between their worlds. Except actually their worlds aren't even really separate.

Things keep changing, depending on the light they're in, depending on whose hands they rest in, depending on who's just spoken, depending on the season. Tomb robbing seems, prima facie, a bad thing, but when you see the small, ancient items of daily life in the hands of the tombaroli and their friends, it doesn't feel that way. It's like the items are living again and cherished again--until a character named Italia (great name for someone speaking out about the theft of the patrimony of the country, but also ironic! Because she's from Brazil) calls direct attention to the enormity of what they're doing:

What are they going to do? Steal from the souls? ... Those things aren't made for human eyes.

And then your vision swings around to desecration, destruction. Light hits ancient paintings of birds and a sheen of something, some magic or divinity, melts away from them. Ordinary people ("they weren't all pharaohs," one of the tumbaroli points out) speak plaintively of their missing grave goods ("There was also a golden fibula ... it meant a lot to me").

It's a very sensual film. You feel the cold. You feel the wet. You feel the warmth and light. The sound of birds is always with you.

Some words that are spoken near the end of the movie, by a character who's transformed an abandoned building, really lingered with me:

It didn't belong to anyone or it belonged to everyone ... [This is] only a temporary setup. But life itself is temporary.

It's a current film, so you have to pay to see it, but it is so, so worth it.