The story: An English archaeologist (Josh O’Connor) after a prison stint in Italy returns to the countryside and falls back in with his merry band of tomb raiders, Lara Croft decidedly not among them.

La Chimera is set around 1980 Tuscany, although place and time are a liminal space in the pastoral magic-realist fables of Italian auteur Alice Rohrwacher.

The Tuscan native is revered in the cinephile circle for her autobiographical storytelling and unique cinematic language. All four of the writer-director’s narrative features were selected for competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Her latest closes a loose trilogy following The Wonders (2014) and 2018 Cannes’ Best Screenplay winner Happy As Lazzaro.

It is like a folk ballad at once playful and soulful. There are troubadours, and the singing, dancing gang of vagabond grave-robbers are carnivalesque carousers straight out of a movie by the director’s 1950s cinema forebear Federico Fellini.

Arthur, played by O’Connor from the Netflix series The Crown (2019 to 2020), is their reluctant leader because of his preternatural instinct for dowsing Etruscan burial sites. They dig up antiquities from the crypts, and then fence the loot to a shady dealer (the film-maker’s sister, Alba Rohrwacher).