The Tale of King Crab

A group of elderly Italian men sit round a table and recount an old tale of a man named Luciano a century ago. Luciano resembles a young unshaved Donald Sutherland, who stumbles around a village permanently drunk. He's an anti-hero in this tale that is more of an urban myth than a conventional story.

The landscape and buildings are stunningly captured by cinematographer Simone D'Arcangelo, and it's possibly the most beautifully shot film of the year.

The film has echoes of Lucrecia Martel's 'Zama, Herzog's 'Aguirre' and even Leone's masterworks. Slow in places, but never anything short of captivating in terms of frame composition, it meanders into a lovely dreamlike climax. Italian cinema at it's finest.

8.3/10.

Despite being heavily indebted to Herzog, Leone and Pasolini, "Re Granchio" (The tale of King Crab) never falls into citationism as an end in itself, but carries on a solid and mature vision of what cinema is in its essence: the poetry of storytelling through images is capable to trasform simple stories into works that arouse wonder. The film fulfills this purpose by playing with genres without exceeding, unraveling through an editing, a cinematography and a soundtrack of rare beauty, giving the actors that homegrown breath that too often gets lost behind the forcedly refined and cloying scripts of so much Italian cinema committed to chasing, with the usual petty rhetoric, easy emotions and the consensus of most people. Here the two directors drag the viewer into a surreal yet tangible world, and as before with the D'innocenzo Bros.' "Favolacce" (Bad Tales), they touch the peaks of Italian cinema as too rarely happens, but perhaps it is precisely their being pearls in the lake - like the crab's treasure - what makes these films memorable and consecrates them to the history of the seventh art.

Technically impeccable, both from a writing, cinematography, acting, scenography and music perspective. Possibly there's a minor problem with the sound editing/mixing: but it may well be the authors' intention to have voices blend with the environment.

Still with its gritty and heavily realistic style, it doesn't succeed in provoking any emotional reaction. A fine tale, but possibly more like a meta-attempt to analyze traditional storytelling, the origins of stories and the likes, than something meaningful that the authors wanted to convey through such a tale (as far as I'm able to understand).

Undecided between a 7 and an 8, I'll go with a 7 since I found it a little slow. Everyone did a great job (especially the 2 young writers/directors and the protagonist): it's possibly just a problem with the source material IMHO (the tale especially in the second part just gets puzzling and unsatisfying) which wasn't that worth the effort.