There may be no more American tale than that of the derelict drunk chased out of his hometown after committing a notorious crime only to wash up some place entirely new, often with a more sober frame of mind, where he makes some grand discovery. This is the story of characters as ranging as Daniel Boone, “Mad Men”’s Don Draper and the Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto Sandino, whose discoveries ran the gamut from the overland route into Kentucky, a famed jingle for hawking Coca-Cola and spiritualist anarcho-communism, respectively.
This is the framework of The Tale of King Crab, a two-part story of a useless drifter who flees Italy to immigrate to Patagonia. The protagonist, Luciano (Gabriele Silli), is a bastard in an unnamed village in Tuscia in Tuscany around the time of Italian unification – that is, 1871 – and he careens through a life balanced between napping in the waving grass and downing large volumes of red wine. The village is desperately poor, with penurious shepherds, storytelling innkeepers and a small fortified keep housing the only family of note. Luciano falls in love with a shepherdess, Emma (Maria Alexandra Lungu), but her father finds it an inappropriate match. Fortunately for Emma’s father, Luciano is the sort of man who often finds trouble. When Luciano next finds some, he winds up left for dead in the forest, yet somehow manages to stagger to his feet and set the small keep ablaze on the village’s festival day, at which point his rich and influential father arranges for him to be exiled rather than imprisoned.
In the film’s second part, then, Luciano becomes one of millions of Italian immigrants to liberalizing Argentina as the country slowly settled its frontier and expanded deeper into Patagonia. Luciano, in a Draper-esque move, steals the more prestigious identity of a dead man. He then proceeds on an epic treasure hunt, hoping to locate the colonial-era trove of gold a shipwrecked Spanish captain stashed on an abandoned island in the wastes near Tierra del Fuego. He is accompanied by a small crew of murderous pirates and the only clue as to the treasure’s whereabouts is the slow peregrinations of a captive crab. Luciano repeatedly stops, take the crab from a pot of water on his back and watches as the crab directs the expedition deeper and deeper into the Patagonian wilderness.
What is more American than a second chance, one that sees a forsaken man battling the indifference of nature to pursue whispers of a fabled fortune in the permissive atmosphere of a New World that is full of the people who have rejected – or who have been rejected by – the stodgy traditionalism of Europe?
The Tale of King Crab is a film of stylistic homages to filmmakers as diverse as Leone, Herzog and Bergman. The cinematography in the first half focuses on the verdant, bounteous environment of the central Italian countryside, with extreme close-ups of characters and objects. In the second half, though, the photography is vast and expansive, stressing the emptiness of the American continent and its enormous untamed spaces, the characters captured at distance. In other words, while much of the style is borrowed, there is plenty here that is original, too.
One major demerit of the film is that it employs a story-in-a-story narrative device, opening in the present-day with old men gathered around a table, exchanging stories. There is no reason for this and the film truly uses this narrative device to contribute nothing at all to the overall story. Perhaps it is supposed to lead the viewer to make some sort of allegorical connection, but, if so, it is not all that successful at doing so!
The Tale of King Crab is an adventure story at its core, evocative at once of the free spirit of Dances with Wolves and the severity of Through a Glass Darkly, balancing those tones with great effect and, usually, an effective grace.
Photo courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories
The post The Tale of King Crab appeared first on Spectrum Culture.