Dark Highways

I think we should start with a song. 

Have you ever heard Common People? Originally by the band Pulp I first heard a cover by the great William Shatner and it struck a deep chord. 

The song is about a rich girl who wants to sleep with a poor boy because she thinks he’s fashionable and dangerous. The boy rejects her. She can’t really live in his world. 

Rent a flat above a shop
Cut your hair and get a job
Smoke some fags and play some pool
Pretend you never went to school
But still you’ll never get it right
‘Cause when you’re laid in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah

The men and women in La Chimera are not exactly common people but they are strikingly poor and they have a fine plan to make themselves rich. 

They’re graverobbers. 

Despite making decent money from their illegal activities, poverty abounds. The movie suggests that most of them are poor because they refuse regular jobs. Arthur, the protagonist, does this early on. 

In their poverty though, everyone seems to live for the moment. I’m not sure I would trade places with these people but Arthur’s group is the life of the party. Anytime they get together and drink or dance or even when they are stealing from the dead it looks like they’re having a hell of a good time. 

Even Arthur, who is hung up on an old girlfriend and beaten down by life and has the mood of a whipped dog sometimes seems to find joy. He has a sweet romance with a young mom and tries to maintain friendships with his neer-do-well friends and a woman who is essentially his ex-mother-in-law.

If crime and romance were the sum total of the La Chimera that would be enough. 

There’s bits of an intriguing crime story here that plays out throughout the flick and reaches a sensible conclusion. The romance too, rises and falls and finds a comfortable ending. 

And then there is the spirituality that also flows through the movie. 

One character wakes another up while he was sleeping. “Now you will never know how the dream ends,” he chuckles. 

At another point the group of grave robbers encounters an honest woman who curses them. 

And Arthur has a spiritual connection with a statue that the group finds in a grave. 

“Human eyes were not meant to see this,” he says. 

There is also an otherworldly encounter that I am doing my best not to spoil. But when it happened it took me from amusement into another realm. 

I knew I was in good hands early on after Arthur has a fight on a train and is watched closely by a row of travelers who then disappear into their cabins when he turns to look at them. 

And then this encounter later turned the screw. 

The movie ends with a scene that has deep meaning. Not just for Arthur but for us. 

Josh O’Connor is impossibly cool as Arthur, you will want to run away with Carol Duarte’s Italia and Vincenzo Nemolato immediately made me want to be his best friend. Even if he was, perhaps, a beast. 

And, Isabella Rossellini, is pitch perfect as an Italian grandmother who wants to ditch her daughters and adopt Arthur and Italia. No surprise there, Rossellini is a screen legend, but she can still grab you with just a look. 

Director Alice Rohrwacher and writers Carmela Covino and Marco Pettenello have delivered a low key masterpiece here. 

Haunting, lyrical and full of mystery.

Every film geek you know is gonna have this high on their lists at the end of the year. But, they are not wrong.