La Chimera

So, I'm totally going against the current here, but I know I'll stand by my opinion and I would really like to meet people who were excited about this and discuss it. However, my review mainly comes from the disappointment that came after I had La Chimera among the top films I definitely wanted to see at the Karlovy Vary Festival after the Cannes reviews. I was so close to leaving the screening and it's really hard for me to explain why. It's probably more about the feelings I had while watching this film: confusion, disgust, incomprehension, detachment, indifference, irritation, fatigue. All the characters extremely unsympathetic, purposeless, without any character for the viewer to love. The plot essentially indescribably about nothing. The genre promised fantasy, but a few fantasy moments felt more like a parody. The camera unfriendly and repulsive. Chaos, yelling, nonsense everywhere. I guess I understand that this is just a certain type of cinematography and probably pays homage to past styles of Italian neorealism, but that's where I probably found my Achilles' heel, at least in the work of Alice Rohrwacher. KVIFF 2023 (20.07.2023)