Dead Reckoning: A Look at La Chimera

A while back, when I was going through a crisis and not altogether in my right mind, I wronged someone I thought of as a friend. I didn’t mean to do it and it didn’t occur to me that what I did would cause harm, but I realize now that if you stand outside someone’s house and call out is OK to rob your house and they don’t answer, that’s not necessarily an invitation to rob their house. The metaphorical homeowner in this case was rightly enraged, but instead of confronting me about it, she made someone else confront me, which led to even more misunderstanding and more rage. I apologized through the intermediary. I metaphorically returned the jewelry and the artwork and the HDTV and tried to scrub off the marks on the walls I'd made while hauling out and back in the metaphorical leather couch. In response, I received a hurtful text followed by an immediate block.

Bitterness and Revenge

I get it. You can’t expect forgiveness from someone you’ve wronged, you can only hope for it and then lift your head and look out towards the horizon again. What I didn’t get was how long and hard this person would continue to punish me.

Revenge is seductive. It feels insanely, crack-smokingly good to stoke the bloodlust fueled by aggrievement. (Edited to say: Revenge isn't just celebrated as a virtue in American society, it's codified into state law.) The Jacobeans, not to mention Shakespeare, made an art form of it, and if you Google “revenge tragedies” you’ll find articles with titles like “Cannibalism and the Act of Revenge in Tudor-Stuart Drama.” I have no fears this person will cannibalize me. She doesn’t eat meat. But there’s cruelty there that seems to me, someone who has at times been suicidal over the past few months, alarming in its long-simmering intensity.

The Message of La Chimera

I have been thinking of this after watching La Chimera, a film that’s a modern-day nod to Orpheus as envisaged by Fellini, but with a feminist twist to the fantastical plot. It unspools as a loose and shaggy narrative with a cast that includes Isabella Rossellini as a wheelchair-bound matriarch and unknown actors playing a carousing band of scruffy rogues and minstrels who argue, sing, dance, drink Tuscan rotgut, dress in drag and drive in local feast day parades and, not incidentally, rob ancient graves. (There are spoilers coming, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know what happens to our thieving Orfeo.)

Its protagonist is a stranger in a strange land who wanders aimlessly having experienced or about to experience the loss of nearly everything—love, his home, warm clothing. He has a gift for seeing things others don’t. But it’s not until he realizes, with the help of a single mom and aspiring opera singer played by an enchanting Carol Duarte, he’s stealing more than just stuff that he starts to understand the truth of what life and death, the sacred and the profane, and being human are all about. None of which matters to the grave robbers who think he’s robbed them instead of the dead and who trick him into descending into yet another grave, whereupon they seal it shut so he can die a slow death, alone and in the dark. The vengeful text block to end all text blocks.

The Mystery of It All

But then something interesting happens. A dream, a fantasy, a reckoning, a reunion? Whatever it is, it hints that the material world and all its squabbles and sacks of loot are nothing compared to what comes next no matter how terrifying the shuddering thud of the grave door above your head. If you humble yourself, atone, believe in love and the power of redemption, director Alice Rohrwacher seems to say, the rest magically disappears like a fawn-covered kantharos into a hole in the earth.

I can’t undo what was done. I can only ask for forgiveness. To try to see the good in people when they insist on seeing the bad in me. La Chimera, loosely translated, means “the unattainable dream.” But I plan to attain my dream of happiness and redemption. To snatch it back from the roving band of grave robbers and hold it aloft like a banner or a bottle of Tuscan rotgut while riding perched on the back of a convertible in my own local feast day parade.