The Tale Of King Crab

He’s a good man, they say, but when he drinks, he loses control of himself. And he drinks a lot.

Perhaps he has reason to. Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’ rambling, mythic tale opens with a documentary element: a group of old men sitting around a table in a small Tuscan bar, sharing stories and a song about the doctor’s son, Luciano, who once lived in those parts. Even from the outset, there’s a melancholic tone to it, a reflection on what might have been but was snatched away by fate. his mother made him a bastard, the song says. Recollections vary, but one theme which holds fast is his resentment and his certainty that he ought to have the same rights as any other man. This is, after all, supposed to be a republic. Why should he not live as he pleases, like any other man, like a prince?

Stumbling around in mud-flecked trousers, loose cotton shirts and spectacularly wild beard, Luciano (Gabriele Silli) alternates between glowering intensity and wide-eyed helplessness. he’s confused by the injustices of the world and struggles to take them seriously. His hopes, and his downfall, rest on two things. One is his passion for Emma (Maria Alexandra Lungu), the daughter of a man who despises him – a young woman who is happy to accept his embraces but is as autonomous as he is and neither able nor willing to give way to his certainty in every aspect of life. The other is his certainty of his right to pass through an ancient doorway which the villagers have long used when going about their daily business, but which has now been closed – so we’re told – on the orders of the Prince. In his drunken clarity, Luciano understands this in a way that the other villagers, who cling closely to tradition, cannot; but what he seems unable to understand is that other human beings do not behave rationally and trying to force them to do so is dangerous.

The film is split into two chapters, the first set in the crumbling, overgrown village and the second on the far side of the world, in the bleak mountainous expanse of Tierra del Fuego: specifically, an island whose rivers are poisoned by algae, deterring explorers. A wrecked ship on its rocky coast serves as a reminder, its sailors having quickly met their doom. Here, the exiled Luciano, passing himself off as a priest, uses a crab to search for the fabled treasures of the slaughtered native people, which are said to be hidden in a remote lake. It’s a wildly romantic setting, made still more beautiful by Simone d’Arcangelo’s cinematography, yet the men who inhabit it are focused on material things. To obtain the wealth which could enable him to return home, Luciano must survive human violence as well as the terrain itself.

In shifting gears from bucolic European drama to hard-edged western, in moving from the shadows of trees, ruins and castles to a place where everything is exposed under the unrelenting sky, The Tale Of King Crab passes comment on the drive that took Europeans to the New World, and on the weight of bitterness and destructive inclination they took with them. As the place where those who cannot submit to Europe’s hierarchies wash up, Tierra del Fuego becomes a realm of monsters, and at this stage – in the early 20th Century – they have nothing left to feed on but each other. What marks out Luciano is that he still retains a sense of the poetic, a love of beauty for its own sake. With every other concern set aside save for the focus of his quest, this comes to illustrate his madness. It might give him the edge, inspiring him to keep on pushing where others fall, but it could also consume him.

A rambling yarn with moments of intense focus, this film will appeal to fans of late 19th Century adventure novels and more recent South American magical realism. Though it avoids stepping over wholly into fantasy territory, it has a clear interest in the nature of the telling of tales and in how irrational beliefs shape the actions of even the most stubbornly rational individuals. The Tuscan tale of the bastard who challenged the Prince has become a local legend. Uprooted, cast adrift in a place where men’s actions go unwitnessed, it becomes myth. In the process, one man’s wish to live on his own terms appears as mad, as hopeless, as necessary as the pursuit of gold.