Italian female filmmaker Alice (“pronounced Ah-lee-chay,” according to Vogue) Rohrwacher leads the legion of girl-power cineastes who impose their gynophilic view on the culture. (Greta Gerwig and Sofia Coppola count themselves among Alice’s fans/colleagues.) Rohrwacher’s newest film, La Chimera, concerns a band of tomb raiders — not swashbucklers as in Angelina Jolie’s video-game-based Lara Croft franchise, but black-market lowlifes who supply ancient artifacts to a high-brow art dealer (played by Rohrwacher’s sister, Alba) who, despite the wild caricature, represents the degradation and dishonesty of contemporary culture.

That’s also the culture of festival-circuit favorite Alice Rohrwacher, yet she is esteemed for taking a personal, nontraditional — i.e., left-wing — approach to storytelling. In fact, the arty posturing in La Chimera is rather conventional. Rohrwacher’s unoriginal, simplistic aim is to wipe the slate of male-filmmaker influence.

So it’s ironic that La Chimera starts with a male protagonist, Arthur (Josh O’Connor), who has a gift for divining buried treasure in Tuscany’s modern slums built over ancient Etruscan ruins. Arthur is British, a bilingual bum attracted to the Italian scene, first seen returning to Tuscany by train after having served a prison sentence for grave-robbing. Rohrwacher conveys this information elliptically, using down-and-dirty details: a train vendor pointing out Arthur’s rank, smelly demeanor.

Throughout La Chimera, Arthur’s filthy white suit gives him tarnished-angel status as he mourns a dead fiancée, an aged opera singer’s daughter who was enchanted by his miscreant behavior (the singer, Flora, is played by Isabella Rossellini). Rohrwacher similarly dotes on Arthur and his gang of vandals, patronizing their colorful, raucous vulgarity. It’s a debased version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s radical empathy with social outsiders and low-class thugs, only without Pasolini’s spiritual fascination. Rohrwacher attempts to correct Pasolini, basing antisocial rebellion on New World Order reform. “Being able to look with the eyes of a foreigner is maybe the best way to see ourselves,” she told the Hollywood Reporter, justifying Arthur’s expatriate status — a liberal filmmaker’s reflexive response to the global illegal-immigrant crisis.

This privileged-class perspective ranks Rohrwacher’s politics with Sofia and Greta’s petulance. She’s a better filmmaker than both, with a real eye for visual detail (helped by her cinematographer and editor, respectively Hélène Louvart and Nelly Quettier, whose imagery glows and pulses). Still, nothing Rohrwacher does is new. Her disjunctive narrative structure merely retreads magical realism — in which Flora’s gaggle of daughters and housekeeper Italia (Carol Duarte), who hides a biracial child, might be superstitious illusions, a way to sentimentalize what is troublesome.

It’s a spoiled girl’s way of simultaneously disrespecting cultural tradition and rooting for its destruction. Arthur and his pirates (I tomaroli) and the rapacious dealer are amoral, grasping their spoils (an apotropaic phallic amulet, Asko pottery, and a Greek kylix cup once used in formal symposia) and only interested in plunder.

These characters commit blasphemy toward the past, just as Rohrwacher digs up relics of dead souls, objects deemed “not for human eyes.” The feminist-cinema symbology is obvious.

For Rohrwacher, a chimera represents what is hoped or wished for but is, in fact, illusory. Such is her updated disregard for patriarchal tradition. (European Rohrwacher is intellectual, while Americans Sofia and Greta absolutely are not.) Some moviegoers might recall how the past was understood through the present in that breathtaking sequence of Fellini’s Roma in which ancient frescoes were unearthed and then erased by a sudden draft of oxygen — or that unforgettably succinct moment in Antonioni’s L’Avventura when an Etruscan vase is accidentally dropped on a rocky island. Critic Gregory Solman, on the Senses of Cinema website, described Antonioni as “an artist seeing so far into the future, it’s as if he were picking through the shards of the world to come as an ancient ruin of civilization.” But Rohrwacher’s commitment to progressive feminism falls short of great insight.

In her Hollywood Reporter interview, Rohrwacher said she was most interested in “the moment when a man feels entitled to enter a sacred space, because he no longer has faith, and destroys it.” She explained Arthur’s Millennial disdain (and her own): “He feels he has that right because he feels different and entitled.” Surrogate Arthur razes Western culture, and Rohrwacher, despite centuries of Italian heritage, romanticizes the act through feminist skullduggery.