Herzog, Pasolini, Leone, Olmi, Alice Rohrwacher, even Nicolas Winding Refn—and of course the Taviani brothers, as any time a grumpy peasant, and a loner, is seen on screen. If so many critics have felt the tactless urge to compare it with with the works of such a prestigious host of filmmakers, it can’t be solely because they had nothing else to say—Re Granchio does encourage comparisons. And yet, being the fortunate fantasy of some passionate cinephiles prone to respectful homages, doesn’t mar in the slightest its value.
Like the folktales handed down by the elderly, often enriched by the extra glass of wine, Re Granchio is a crafty patchwork of different styles and narratives. Elaborating a fragmentary legend running among the regulars of an actual hunt house who meaningfully appear in the film as a sort of passing on the baton, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis go to the roots of storytelling to create the enigmatic character to whom artist Gabriele Silli lends his towering figure and magnetic stare. A drunkard, a free spirit and a fine thinker, a charlatan, a traveller, or a criminal, Luciano is the ousted nobody, an improbable and scruffier Ulysses who takes us from Tuscia to the edge of the world, incarnating the very essence of the romantic hero—the adventurer of his own life, struggling through and against his ineludible idiosyncrasies in search of atonement.
No matter how messy or flawed, Re Granchio’s genuine candidness and evocative imaginary are too attractive to let wordy scrutinies or presumptuous intellectual ejaculations get in the way—this is just cinema in its truest and most poignant incarnation. Aren’t we, after all, following too un cangrejo, persuading ourselves, step after step, that it is showing us the way?
‘Svanì per sempre il sogno mio d’amore. L’ora è fuggita, e muoio disperato. E non ho amato mai tanto la vita.’
