The Tale of King Crab

Old men tell the best stories, and they're always best when they all know the tale. So as a cadre of old friends gather in a trattoria to break bread and tell the story of Luciano, the holy fool of legend in their little Italian town, there's a feeling of being the outsider at the recounting of the old joke that is The Tale of King Crab.

Maybe it's the documentary background of co-directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis that give this scene – and the occasional returns to their pleasant evening retelling a terrible tale – such a naturalistic feel in contrast to the stylized story that follows. Luciano (Silli), the men recount, was the son of the local doctor, the black sheep in this village of goat farmers. He's a drunken, dissolute rake – or he would be, if this rural backwater wasn't so stagnant. His sole source of joy is in the times he spends with his childhood sweetheart (Lungu); his greatest frustration is in the times he spends with the rambling old fools of his time. Luciano, as the old men in the trattoria say, lived over a hundred years ago, and not much has changed.

The first half of this historical drama feels like a meandering Brechtian allegory about the folly of opposing truly corrupt power, as the venal influence of a preposterous prince and his uncontrolled guards corrupts everything around Luciano. Out of left field – or, arguably, inevitably – the tone and location change as Luciano is exiled to Tierra del Fuego, disguised as a priest and conniving with treasure hunters to find a cache of Incan gold. However, it's not as radical a shift as it at first seems: the Old World, the New World, both are nothing more than uncaring backgrounds for the cruelty and arbitrary greed of men.

By turns beautiful and ugly, occasionally infuriating in its obfuscation and disconnect, always slow and intriguing, King Crab is powered by the wild-eyed and soft-spoken charisma of Silli as the instinctually rebellious and disdainful Luciano. A sculptor rather than an actor, he purposefully stumbles through a world that looks like it was painted by the Macchiaioli, the Tuscan contemporaries of the Impressionists whose name referred to their habit of painting the world in macchie or spots. Here, cinematographer Simone D'Arcangelo does something similar, whether it be rocks under water, cracking plaster on walls, or liver spots and broken blood vessels. Everything around Luciano seems corrupted, and that seems to be the point, even if Righi and Zoppis do not always bring those themes into a coherent focus. When Luciano screams from the side of an extinct volcano at an absentee god, the joke definitely seems to be on him.