.

Sitting there, watching this, my overriding thought was how nice it was to see what they could do back in the early eighties with a video camera and fifty quid. This wasn’t made forty years ago though and despite appearances I’m sure the budget was a wee bit higher than I’d supposed as well.

The historical setting is deliberate, and as kind of suggested very well realised, but the apparent cheapness of the whole thing is quite the distraction. There are strong performances here and intermittent poetry in the narrative but I just couldn’t get past the fact that it looked as though it was filmed by two kids who stole Dad’s camcorder and rode out to the woods on their Raleigh Choppers.

Seriously, I don’t understand the choice of locations in this film. Are we really to believe that this band of pseudo archaeologists are finding rare and valuable Etruscan antiquities that have been hidden since before Roman times under building sites, power plants and among the trees where half the town must be walking their dogs? Why the limited settings? It’s like Indiana Jones made by CBBC.

If it weren’t for this I’m sure I’d have been more forgiving of the film’s other flaws, the characters behave in very random ways, the whole tone is very mixed and there is a heavy metaphor about threads running through the past but no central thread running through the plot, but as it is I just did not get on with it.

Isabella Rossellini appears in a role where all of the untouchable, statuesque composure of her usual characters falls away to be replaced by new cuddly grandma stylings; the woman who normally gives out icy stares (good as she is) looking like she’d this time give you twenty pence to get yourself a Mars bar. Then there’s Josh O’Connor on lead duties, apparently cast (good as he is) as the Andie MacDowell in a European movie to make it appeal to a wider international audience.

I know others have rated this movie; it has been very well reviewed. The official synopsis says ‘everyone has their own Chimera, something they try to achieve but never manage to find’. My Chimera might be a fair appreciation of this odd, disjointed film.