by Ryan Smillie, Staff Writer

The Tale of King Crab
Written and Directed by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis 
Starring Gabriele Silli, Maria Alexandra Lungu and Ercole Colnago
Runtime: 105 minutes

The Tale of King Crab is the latest in a line of arthouse films to ask the question, “What the hell was going on in 19th century Argentina?” Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja found Viggo Mortensen wandering through an inhospitable and hallucinatory desert, while Lucretia Martel’s titular Zama couldn’t catch a break – not with the woman he wants to seduce, not with the criminal he wants to catch, and certainly not within the Spanish colonial bureaucracy. So it should come as no surprise to see King Crab’s Luciano (Gabriele Silli) exiled in Tierra Del Fuego, following a crab in search of a fabled treasure.

But King Crab starts well before Luciano’s Argentinian exile. Inspired by yet another story from the Lazian hunters from whom they’ve already adapted two into non-fiction works, directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis pick up the straggly-bearded Luciano’s legend upon his return to rustic Vejano from a stay at a madhouse in Rome. Though Rigo de Righi and Zoppis have researched the real Luciano’s life (up to a point), they frame his story as being told by a group of contemporary hunters, the same people who introduced them to Luciano. Thus, from the beginning, the film is about the act of storytelling. The details of the plot (primarily, Luciano’s drunkenness and his doomed affair with Maria Alexandra Lungu’s Emma) don’t matter as much as how the story is being told. Cinematographer Simone d’Arcangelo’s painterly landscapes evoke Camille Corot, with soft light shimmering through muted earth tones. Even when interrupted by shocks of red – wine, blood, or fire – d’Arcangelo’s images don’t demand to be believed. Rather, they suggest a way something could have happened, the way a story might be told.

The hunters’ tale ends when Luciano leaves Italy for Argentina, but through their research, Rigo de Righi and Zoppis have uncovered multiple possible Lucianos and even more Italian immigrants in Tierra Del Fuego. The second half of King Crab, then, serves as a synthesis of all of these stories, centered on a typical American act of reinvention. The landscape becomes more otherworldly, with rocky hills and iridescent lagoons far from the bucolic Italian countryside, both by distance and appearance. While there certainly is a narrative (a vivid red crab might be leading Luciano to a hidden source of gold), the vibes and imagery are much richer. It’s easy to imagine Luciano’s story as one of the many folk songs that punctuate the first half of the film – both dreamy and ephemeral. 

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
Written and Directed by Aleksandre Koberidze
Starring Giorgi Ambroladze, Oliko Barbakadze, and Giorgi Bochorishvili
Runtime: 150 minutes

After two chance meetings in one day, it’s love at first (or maybe second) sight for Lisa and Giorgi (Ani Karseladze and Giorgi Ambroladze). They’re so sure of their feelings that they agree to meet at a nearby café the next day without even asking for the other’s name, oblivious to the curse about to change both of their appearances. Though a number of inanimate objects warn Lisa of what’s about to happen, she is powerless to stop it. Like a child performing a magic trick, an unseen narrator (director Alexandre Koberidze) invites the audience to close their eyes as Lisa wakes up, no longer Karseladze, but now played by Oliko Barbakadze.

I’ll admit that I peeked after Koberidze told me to close my eyes, but that early instruction is key to understanding What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? While all of our eyes are ostensibly closed, nothing happens! Lisa is asleep, already Barbakadze. But we become open to the possibility that something could – that something did – happen. In What Do We See, Koberidze might drag the story out a bit too long, but he strikes a unique balance – a film that’s sweet, whimsical, and magical, without ever becoming saccharine or twee. In every shot, the millennia-old city of Kutaisi glows, thanks both to Faraz Fesharaki’s precise and brilliant cinematography and the love Koberidze infuses into every aspect of the film, all the way down to the World Cup-watching dogs of Kutaisi.

Waking up as the new Giorgi, Girogi Bochorishvili is particularly delightful as his transformation sees him visibly descend into an existential crisis, especially once he and Lisa separately realize that the curse has also stripped them of their talents (his, soccer, and hers, medicine). Unable to continue with their former lives, they take jobs working across the street from each other, both working for the owner of the café where they had planned to meet. As the film goes on and the two eventually become friends, a magical moment of realization feels tantalizingly within reach – especially when a team of filmmakers encourages them to pose as a couple for a film shoot. But the film continues on along its dreamlike path, taking in the sites of the Rioni River, the children playing soccer in the street, even just an empty field that suddenly feels beautiful with Giorgi Koberidze’s harp and piano score swelling underneath. It isn’t until the film’s narrator-slash-director expounds upon his doubts about filmmaking in a world beset by tragedy that the film’s true aim becomes apparent. And I hate to say it, but it really did warm my heart.

Hester Street
Directed by Joan Micklin Silver
Written by Joan Micklin Silver (based on the novella by Abraham Cahan)
Starring Steven Keats, Carol Kane and Mel Howard
Runtime: 89 minutes

One of my favorite parts of the New York Film Festival is their always-stellar lineup of revivals, and this year is no exception. Cohen Media Group’s 4K restoration of Joan Micklin Silver’s 1975 Hester Street was at the top of my list this year, and it did not disappoint. Silver’s low-budget Yiddish debut about late 19th-century Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side was a surprise hit after being rejected by multiple studios, earning $5,000,000 against a $370,000 budget, and earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for its star, Carol Kane. Forty-six year later, the film still feels fresh and different, and with this new restoration, Kenneth Van Sickle’s black-and-white cinematography is sharper than ever.

Steven Keats’s Yankel Bogovink starts the film as an already-Americanized immigrant, with a shaved beard, an American mistress, and a new name, Jake. His American life is disrupted by the arrival of his still-traditional wife, Gitl (Kane), and their son. Jake has no patience for Gitl – neither her old-world customs nor her intrusion into his life as basically a single man. Gitl is eventually clued in to Jake’s ongoing affair by a busybody neighbor (Doris Roberts, in a preview of her later role on Everybody Loves Raymond), the two divorce and remarry – Jake to his mistress and Gitl to Bernstein, a fellow immigrant who’s held on to a few more traditional habits than Jake.

It’s not a particularly complicated story, but Silver brings it to life through meticulous attention to detail. At times it feels as if someone had somehow transported then-modern filmmaking equipment to 1890s Lower Manhattan – the costumes and settings feel that realistic, from the tiny apartments to the crowded streets. You expect to see a baby Fanny Brice popping her head out of a corner saloon at any moment. Some of the few bits of English dialogue sound a bit too modern, but that’s a small price to pay for a film that brings another century to life so vividly.

But it’s a 24-year-old Carol Kane who walks away with the movie. For much of the movie, she’s like a silent movie actress, quietly taking in the sights of her new home as she realizes her husband is not the man she thought he was. The entire movie plays out on her expressive face, used so well in comedy in the following decades, climaxing in a meeting with a divorce lawyer who keeps offering her more of her husband’s mistress’s money to settle the divorce, misconstruing her distraught reaction to getting divorced to a disgust at a low-ball divorce settlement. She walks away with a fortune that she gets to share with Bernstein.

It’s a shame that Silver never achieved the success she deserved. You’d assume that a male filmmaker whose debut film grossed over 13 times its budget would have a blank check to make anything he wanted. But Silver’s career was marked by limited opportunity and studio interference. Thirteen years after Hester Street, Silver again faced issues getting distribution for her now-most-well-known film, Crossing Delancey, until Steven Spielberg, then the husband of its star, Amy Irving, intervened to secure a release for the film. Silver passed away this past New Year’s Eve, but her legacy lives on, both through the generations of filmmakers she inspired and the films like Hester Street that she was able to make – a triumph on their own, and a reminder of what could have been.