Suits, crumpled dreams and 'La Chimera'
The particular appeal of a lovely white suit that's falling apart
Well, look, whatever this substack is about, it’s not anything. I hope that clear’s up that little controversy.1
Nevertheless, I do think it’s stretchy enough to permit a few entangled thoughts on ‘La Chimera’, Alice Rohrwacher’s new2 movie. They consist mainly of me going, “what an excellent suit”.
There is something - that elusive something - about a shabby film where someone treads through the whole messy thing in a suit. The movie itself has a dreamlike, broken, grunge-elegant quality … like a fable told by some charming aristocrat living in a rotting box under a bridge. It’s about some tombaroli (“grave robbers”) who nick exquisite bits and bobs out of undiscovered Etruscan tombs in 1980s Italy. The group is led by a British archaeologist named Arthur (played by Josh O’Connor) … about whom we are given next to no information, save that he is from England, fairly well-spoken (in the half dozen lines he speaks in English) and has two suits with him. (In various reviews, they describe him as an academic, but I think I missed the line where this was said3.)
The feeling is joyful and melancholic and grimy and fantastical … splashes of Visconti, dashes of Withnail, some seedy sprinkles of ‘Shameless’. It has Kraftwerk and Monteverdi and moments where the characters look at you and beautiful bits of camera-work. It also has a lovely decayed old villa (something that is profoundly, unquestionably snoot). It isn’t quite the perfect patrician palace we all love in La Dolce Vita4 (“we”), but it has Isabella Rossellini living in it. For more comprehensive reviews try here or here or here …
Nevertheless, the white suit, the white suit … it’s just so … right. What does Rohrwacher herself say? Well, here in Vogue (Vogue again? This substack just can’t get enough of Vogue - not the New England Journal of Medicine for us, or the New York Review of Books, just good old Vogue)5, she says:
“we try to work on that fine line between realism and fairy tales, so the costumes also have a deeper, symbolic meaning. Arthur has this white suit that he wears throughout the seasons because he may be a ghost—he may or may not exist. Flora wears black, the color of grief, because she is missing her daughter, and the woman Arthur is looking for is a rainbow of colors.”
Ah yes, Arthur does have a sort of supernatural quality about tombs, and he communes with memories and such. Check those other reviews. (Or see the film ofc.)
But on top of this, there’s always something raffish, you see … something of the unforced dandy. As a costume, yes, it has deep in its soiled stitches, something of the inevitable failure about it. The late James Salter, writer of the excellent ‘Light Years’ (along with much more besides) was once asked about fame and “he compared it to a white linen suit. “You’d give anything in the world to have it,” he told me, “and then somebody buys it for you and you don’t wear it very much.”6
☁️ white suits, eh? ☁️
I mean, of course, there’s a handful of white suits in the old cinema. Famously there’s the one in ‘The Man in the White Suit’, for those of you who’d like another satire about capitalism and the deadening effect of money on art (oh yes, La Chimera is a bit of an old satire about capitalism and the deadening effect of money).
Or there’s this one from ‘the Great Gatsby’ (for those who like something about the deadening effect of money and the nature of capitalism - wait, hang on - have I stumbled upon a theme?). Fitzgerald has the narrator spot Gatsby in “white-flannel suit, silver shirt, and a gold-colored tie” but clearly he’s having a bit of an old chuckle up his sleeve at [spoiler alert] non-U old Jay7:
But Sidney Stratton (the hero of The Man in the White Suit) and Jay Gatsby aren’t at all what I mean. No, nor ‘the Godfather’ nor ‘Miami Vice’ nor ‘Saturday Night Fever’ neither. Yes yes, their white suits bespeak innocence or vulgar 20s silliness or 80s confidence or whatever. Nor do I mean the one worn by Tom Wolfe. No no, I am thinking of the raffish but sad white suit … so I think it has to be linen and worn somewhere abroad.
Like this one:
The one the drunken, charming Englishman played by Robert Pattinson wears (who was, they keep saying, based on Christopher Hitchens8) in ‘Tenet’. Inigo Thomas in a piece for Slate about “White Suits” specifically carves out “the man in the rumpled white suit”:
“This is the man from the pages of Graham Greene’s fictions, symbol of the man gone wild in the jungle, who, like a plant taken from Europe to the equator, has become a monstrosity with no hope of returning home, no hope of redemption, but mainly with no hope of finding a cleaner to attend to his white suit.”9
Yes yes, this. Of course, it would be interesting to know what Inigo Thomas, the writer of the piece for Slate thinks of the suit in La Chimera but INIGO THOMAS DOESN’T HAVE A SUBSTACK. Yet.
This, finally, is the mood though of the rumpled white suit - the lost, collapsed, thoughtful soul - who still maintains his little standards … a suit, that speaks of better times, and wearing it. Blended perhaps with an indifference - born of arrogance or failure or both - to what people might think of tailoring so unspeakably elitist and charming.
It’s why Bond, when he regenerated in his Lazenby mode, doesn’t have quite that chic despair in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service:
It has to pick up dirt, or look like it’s on the cusp of doing it. The assuredness of Bond, his endless competence, that’s not it at all.
Perhaps it’s just some abroad who is sad. And so10 what is the analysis … for substack warns me I am over the limit (“time, gentlemen please”).
Perhaps this: the white suit itself is made of sad illusions … its lapels are stitched from broken dreams and its buttons are built of genteel decay. Top marks for La Chimera, then … may its suits win all the prizes.
A coherent and measured analysis, I think you’ll agree (he said nervously, for this is a tightrope and I am never sure how high or how thin the rope)
Well, new-ish. It was released this year, but made last year.
And there was someone in the seat in front with a bun, so I couldn’t see one word in the subtitles whenever someone spoke.
To which we will return
“Filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher on La Chimera, Her Enchanting, Earthy New Film About the Past in the Present”, Vogue, 29.3.24
‘My Hero: James Salter’ in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/27/my-hero-james-salter-by-rupert-thomson
Or maybe he isn’t … a question for another day.
“A lot of my character stuff, I was trying to do a Chris Hitchens impersonation, and I completely forgot that I was doing that until I saw my notes.” ‘Robert Pattinson: A Dispatch From Isolation’, GQ, 12th May 2020. I’d like to come back to Christopher Hitchens. And to Tenet. Sigh … so much to do.
I also snitched the quotation from Gatsby from here rather than looking it up myself: https://slate.com/culture/2005/05/the-enduring-mystique-of-the-white-suit.html
I feel entirely comfortable beginning this sentence with a conjunction … I think it’s because of La Chimera and its world weariness.