What a roll Josh O’Connor is on right now. Anyone who has failed to grasp his formidable range should treat themselves to a double bill of his current films: see him dangerously driven and fiercely charismatic in tennis shorts in Challengers, then follow it up with Alice Rohrwacher’s glorious Italian-language film La Chimera, and a frayed, wounded O’Connor performance that ranks among his very finest to date.
As Arthur, a renegade British archaeologist in 1980s Tuscany, O’Connor plays his character as a man adrift and disconnected from the world. In his ghostly, off-white suit, its grubby linen the colour of a recently disinterred shroud, Arthur looks like a fallen angel from a Caravaggio painting. The de facto leader, thanks to his mystical gift for divining the location of long-sealed tombs, of a rowdy and disreputable band of grave robbers, or tombaroli, Arthur reluctantly inhabits the present but is continually drawn to the past: to the distant past, and the beauty of the ancient artefacts that he hawks to collectors, and to the recent past, and an elusive time of happiness with his lost love Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello). It’s worth mentioning that the character was originally written as a man in his 40s or 50s, rather than O’Connor’s early 30s, but the pensive, rumpled, old-soul quality in O’Connor’s performance works so well that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. And after all, age, like time itself, is not a straightforward concept in La Chimera.
