At any given time in New York City’s indie movie-theater scene, there’s a chance you could catch a Wong Kar-wai film or a Federico Fellini restoration. It’s all but certain that you can see Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession or Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal on an odd Tuesday, and in 2021, Film Forum played Jacques Deray’s La Piscine for 14 weeks as the summer stretched into fall. Rarely do new releases stick around for very long — often edged out by waning interest or new 4K restorations of older films — until Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, which just concluded its 25-week run at the West Village’s IFC Center on September 19.
La Chimera premiered at Cannes in the spring of 2023 to strong reviews and, having been bought and distributed by Neon, opened in late March of this year. The Italian film stars hunk-of-late-spring Josh O’Connor (who is English, but speaks Italian throughout the film) as a tombarolo — or grave-robber — who runs around Umbria with a band of like-minded thieves in search of Etruscan artifacts they can sell to a mysterious collector who goes by Spartaco. The film is dreamy, funny, and often romantic, as O’Connor’s Arthur searches for his lost lover, Beniamina, while he pursues a new interest, the charismatic Italia (Carol Duarte). There are songs, there are mixed film formats, there’s Alba Rohrwacher (that’s Alice’s sister) saying “to estimate the inestimable†— La Chimera promised a rich, textured viewing experience, the type of which doesn’t demand but encourages multiple viewings to scratch the surface of its brilliance.
A late-spring release can be a tricky time for a new film: Even those with moderate-to-good buzz get edged out by later releases and the summer movie season. But an April bump from Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, which stars O’Connor as horny and mean tennis player Patrick Zweig, gave La Chimera the momentum it needed to stick around through the spring. Harris Dew, a general manager of IFC Center, emphasized how rare this turnout was in an email, “There would be weeks where attendance would start to taper off, and then the following week, we’d see it rebound and even increase. It’s pretty rare to see audience numbers go up for a film in its eighth or ninth week, much less in its 20th or 21st!â€
It’d been almost a decade since a new release playing at IFC had a run like La Chimera’s, Dew added, citing Richard Linklater’s Boyhood as the most recent example — though that movie played for nearly nine months upon release. “Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite would’ve gone for more than 25 weeks,†Dew added. “It opened in October 2019, but had to close when the pandemic shut us down in March 2020.†He shouted out other semi-recent hall-of-famers: Wim Wenders’s Pina (35 weeks), Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (34 weeks), Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (30 weeks), and Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (25 weeks).
There was a warmth and comfort to La Chimera’s midyear tenure at IFC; it was always a treat to get off the train at West 4th and wonder, maybe, if it was worth canceling plans to go see the movie one more time. For all that it’s easy to decry the death of independent film or the theatrical experience, La Chimera’s run proved everyone wrong — at least for a little while. Dew said there were about 12,000 people who saw La Chimera across its 25-week run, many of whom lined up to see it for the umpteenth time on its final night (including one viewer who sported a tattoo of the statue from the film). That the film celebrates memory, history, and art all at once made it a fitting staple of the summer’s repertory scene, and suggests, perhaps, that someday someone will dig up their old ticket stub and feel like they’ve stumbled on buried treasure. But don’t be sad because it’s over, be happy because undoubtedly La Chimera will make its way into the company of its repertory peers, vanishing and coming back to theaters again and again and again.