Arthur (Josh O’Connor) is with his friend Pirro (Vincenzo Nemolato), looking at Etruscan pottery that they have. A stranger, however, walks in on them, so they hide this pottery like it’s some secret stash that’s not theirs. Well, that’s because that’s what the two of them ‘do’ for a living – rob Etruscan archaeological sites. One night, they dig themselves into a site that has sculptures that will make them rich. Well, at least Pirro is going to be rich because Arthur is a self exiled bourgeois Englishman. This burial site may be their undoing, as viewers see in Alice Rohrwacher’s fantastical tragicomedy, La Chimera.

Comedy, fantasy, and tragedy come together in La Chimera, a film about a man in perpetual transit. When Arthur isn’t robbing graves, he’s staying with Flora (Isabella Rosselini), his missing girlfriend’s eccentric mother. Helping run her house is Italia (Carol Duarte), who is oblivious to the kind of shady things he does. She isn’t aware, for instance, about Spartaco (Alba Rohrwacher), whose art auction business seems legitimate. The same night that he and Pirro find the big burial site is also when she finds out what he does for a living.

Despite Italia’s appearance of being oblivious, even to men who are into her, she puts things into perspective. That perspective is necessary in a film that takes me back to my art history days when textbooks admit where museum pieces come from – thieves. Of course, it’s really on the nose that Rohrwacher uses an Englishman as the focal point of a film about grave robbers. There’s a lot of that here, especially in a scene when Arthur dreams when he imagines the descendants of his victims. But the rest of the cast give nuance to La Chimera, which some may otherwise see as one about a colonizer’s exploitation.

Pirro, as well as the rest of his crew, are also possible descendants of Etruscans and Romans. Depicting these descendants in La Chimera, yes, have them beholden to a history that’s alien to them. There’s a scene here where Arthur and Pirro have to play photographer for a bunch of tourists. Archeology, theft, tourism, different vocations all pointing to the idea of people yearning for the last. That yearning, though, can be good, as viewers can see in Arthur’s crew mate Melodie (Lou Roy-Lecollinet). She sees the Etruscans as exotic with their feminist society, unlike the barbaric Romans who defeated them.

Melodie’s is a valid view and one reminding us that history changes depending on who’s reading it. History is palimpsest in La Chimera, where characters live in run down manors, shacks, and train stations. Where workplaces are forests with rotting leaves where men like Arthur and Pirro look for burial sites. And when they find something of note, they haul it up to 80s era corporate office spaces. Sure, one can write that it’s easy to make a film in Italy and its ruins. But Rohrwacher does a lot with the spaces she depicts, her camera sometimes feels like she’s hiding. It’s easy framing this within the crime subgenre but the music makes them folk heroes as well.

La Chimera is available to stream in Mubi, which-