This ‘Tale’ Stands Tall in Most Areas of Filmmaking That Matter

Imagine an admixture of ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,’ ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God,’ and ‘Zama,’ and you’ll have some idea of the cinematic ground traversed here.

Still from ‘The Tale of King Crab.’ Courtesy Shellac Films

The cinematographer for “The Tale of King Crab,” Simone D’Arcangelo, had his work cut out for him.  

The Italian film, co-directed by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, is filled with faces — all kinds of faces. Weathered, coarse, and extravagantly contoured, these visages are reminiscent of studies found in the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci, and they’re not pretty. 

Yet under Mr. D’Arcangelo’s exacting and appreciative lens, all those wrinkles, blood vessels, and sagging jowls are rendered beautiful. 

Mr. D’Arcangelo previously worked with Messrs. de Righi and Zoppis on “Il Solengo,” a 2015 documentary about a hermit living on the outskirts of Rome. Clearly the directors knew they had a talent behind the camera — a deeply humane one, as it turns out. Whether training his eye on the verdant forests of Tierra del Fuego or a private gateway with its splintered doors, Mr. D’Arcangelo delivers the goods. “The Tale of King Crab” is a ravishing movie. 

The film opens with a group of elderly men meeting for drinks and dinner. The atmosphere is restive but fond; clearly these are longtime comrades. Songs are sung; stories are told — two stories, in fact, both taking place in the 19th century. 

The first concerns a village drunkard who incurs the wrath of a local prince. The second, a hunt for treasure linked to a crab with mystical powers — or, at least, that’s what a priest, one of the adventurers, believes.

The drunkard and priest are the same man: Luciano (Gabriele Silli), a taciturn local-kid-gone-to-seed, a doctor’s son and the village nuisance. Luciano wanders through the woods of Tuscia on the hunt for a stiff drink and some kind of purpose. 

No one much cares for him, the exception being the shepherd’s daughter, Emma (Maria Alexandra Lungu). Even then, their relationship proves tendentious. Her father — who  at one point spies the couple making love in the woods — isn’t crazy about Luciano’s intention to marry Emma.

 And so begins the first chapter of “The Tale of King Crab.” The second jumps ahead in time; how many years isn’t clear. (Time is an elastic construct throughout the film.) 

Luciano, having been banished from his home, is now in Argentina, which is referred to in a most ignominious way. Armed with a diary that tells of Spanish riches left in an isolated lagoon, he joins up with a trio of unsavory characters: pirates with little moral compass. Things go awry.

For their initial foray into fiction, Messrs. de Righi and Zoppis do well by their fascination with “the incomplete and imperfect mechanism of oral tradition.” The myth-making at the heart of “The Tale of King Crab” is as bristly and dense as Luciano’s immaculately tangled beard. 

Grubby concerns like status, privilege, and greed are tinged with magic and weighted by despair. Imagine an admixture of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” and “Zama,” and you’ll have some idea of the cinematic ground traversed here. 

The structure of “The Tale of King Crab” is problematic, less so for its bifurcation than an ending that yields to a romanticism the rest of the film studiously avoids. Between the dewy-eyed denouement and the wrap-around narration — all those geezers chewing the cud — Messrs. de Righi and Zoppis ultimately prove themselves rookies.

Then again, we should all be such gifted newbies. “The Tale of King Crab” is a riveting story sumptuously told, a reminder that movies can entrance as well as entertain. Let’s see what other stories, however far-fetched or mossy, Messrs. de Righi and Zoppis come up with in the years to come.


The New York Sun

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