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"The Tale Of King Crab"
Luciano (Gabriele Silli) is a wandering outcast in a remote, late 19th-century Italian village. His life becomes undone by alcohol, forbidden love, and a bitter conflict with the prince of the region over the right of passage through an ancient gateway. When the quarrel escalates, Luciano is exiled to the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego where, with the help of ruthless gold-diggers, he searches for a mythical treasure, paving his way toward redemption. However, in these barren lands, only greed and insanity can prevail.
"The Tale Of King Crab" starts in a tiny place, an inn where hunters meet. But to get to the bottom of the story, you need to travel to the other end of the world, to Tierra del Fuego. Luciano’s (Gabriele Silli) story starts in Vejano and ends in South America, in Tierra del Fuego. Luciano is a stranger. The film nourishing the character as an outcast. Besides, we've very little information on his character, the exact timeframe of the events. For traces of the travel Luciano goes on between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Even less did we know about what happened to him in South America. This may be how the script progressively moved from a documentary to fiction. Emma (Maria Alexandra Lungu) is Luciano’s lover. She has a strong personality. She stands up to Luciano, and in a way tame his own savagery. This really is a key role. She might even be the film’s actual protagonist. Luciano’s the hero, no doubt, but the whole movie is kind of about her, in the end.
The film avoids the typical scorched landscapes of an Italian summer and on the contrary show lush nature. The part in Argentina is much more traditional, though not without it's own challenges. And there’s always been a crab in this one. There’s no real explanation to the choice of a crab. The crab Luciano uses to get around Tierra del Fuego is not one of them. To us, it’s nothing more than a surreal, magical element. It's a place full of stories and unbelievable adventures of Italian immigrants. It's a story in Argentina to reflect all those myths drawn from this culture of immigration.
You can hear different kinds of music in "The Tale Of King Crab", and each has a specific role to play. First of all, there’s vocal music that conveys the narrative content. The film choses popular folk songs. And folk songs mostly consist of a melody, often very similar to one another, and of a text that can on the contrary vary very much, depending on the region or even the village. References to characters of popular folk tales are very common in these texts. Some villagers for instance remember a song or part of a song about Luciano. Is it true? Who knows? Just like legends, we all have our own version, and all versions have common elements and variations. And that’s clearly what fascinates us in movies, catching these arborescences. And what’s even more important to us is to maintain and transmit them. Cultural tradition is not something that's fixed, nor completed. Same goes for music, the film wants to engage in a dialogue with tradition, to contribute to it's evolution. Then there's instrumental music, that engages into a dialogue with the images. The film usually avoids the Hollywood-style that consists in highlighting or amplifying the scene’s emotion through music. On the contrary, 'King Crab' seeks a counterpoint to the narrative.
Let’s say we share the idea that auteur cinema is not a film genre per se. In the Italian part as well as in the Argentinian part, we've fun revisiting western figures and scenes. What we like in western movies is for example the idea that a very isolated location, a village, can become the scenery of a mystical story. This makes the strength of the narrative.
Written by Gregory Mann
https://www.ica.art/films/the-tale-of-king-crab
