A film about stories. How these intertwine one inside the other and are handed down from generation to generation, changing incessantly as long as there is someone left to listen and tell them again and again. For example in film form. Because yes, this film is based on a true story, or rather from a true folk tale, which therefore who knows how much it is true to reality. Because "people tell what they know. Only, if they tell ten words, afterwards it is passed on in fifteen words, in fifty words. In the end, there is a bit invented and a bit true. Then you can't find out what is true and what is false". This is said by the elderly people of Vejo (VT) - the location of the shooting and where the events take place - who at the beginning of the film recall the stories of their childhood when "there was no television, we stood around the fireplace and told tales to each other, like the one of Luciano" and they tell this in particular to the two directors of the film. Reading interviews, it turns out that this is exactly how the film was born: around a table of elderly people who sing folk song while sipping red wine. Already here we begin to conceive the anomalous nature of this work, which enormously amplifies its value considering the complexity of the operation and the type of story told: inserting this scene in the tavern and telling a story inspired by "quasi-real" facts" makes this movie a hybrid of documentary, fiction and also post-neorealism, given that most of the actors are non-professionals and citizens of Vejo itself.

But the anomaly can already be felt simply by watching the film, without having to inform yourself first. In fact, if usually this type of multi-level narrative stories start like this, with an outermost frame that presents its internal narrators - the village elders - to perform the function of holding together the series of stories that are about to be told, instead in this case the narrative frame is preceded by a scene that is already part of one of the internal stories, underlying it: the protagonist of the story, of which we therefore do not yet know he will be the protagonist, finds an ancient jewel in a lake, cleans it of mud, admires it and preserves it. Cut, and the tavern scene begins. This subversion is fundamental to understanding the meaning of the film, although it may initially pass through a simple ungrammatical: only when the film ends exactly as it began, in a lake and in search of a treasure, and above all without any return to the outermost frame that instead it is abandoned from the middle of the movie onwards, one realizes that this is a kind of narrative disorder that is not at all casual. As I said at the beginning, this is a film about stories. On their intertwining one inside the other, and on their malleable nature that allows them to remain coherently equidistant between historical representation of the past, fictional story and documentary of the present's reality. And this is only the most evident clue of this intent, masterfully granted only at the end of the film, but in reality suggested continuously throughout its duration.

In fact, the movie is clearly divided in two: after its first half, the folk tale of the Lazio region set in the late 19th century Viterbo Tuscia stops, the traces of its protagonist seem to get lost when nothing else can be derived from the oral tradition.
But with the few clues collected, the interviewed directors say they have carried out research and stumbled upon a quasi-credible continuation of the story, which led them to the other end of the world where in fact the film continues in the second part with a sharp caesura: here too the raw material at the base is a story, but it is a legend of the Argentine Ona Indios of Tierra del Fuego, ethnically and temporally at the antipodes compared to the context of the first. The distance is such and so unpredictable it gives an impression of 'teleportation' to this central turning point of the film, reinforced moreover by the division into chapters 1 and 2 of the narrative and by the fact that it is not only the setting that changes, from Italy to Argentina, but also the genre of the film: from the historical-drama about country life centered around families, poor but warm, which can remember "The Betrothed", with the 'Prince' of the area and his 'bravi' to submit to, but deprived of Manzoni's 'divine providence' to become an obscure and pessimistic version of it; to an adventurous pseudo-western, with world's outcasts at the world's edge struggling to grab a treasure hidden in a rugged and desert territory as much as what is left of their lives that they desperately trying to save with this last chance, half Stevenson's "Treasure Island" half Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".

Yet it is a mere initial impression, as is the beginning of the film, because approaching the finale and while constantly introducing new elements, the two events begin to synthesize in a single story. You notice the analogies in the characters and in their reactions to what happens to them, the protagonist transforms and returns to resemble that of the first part despite being irremediably different, the symbolism of some scenes matches with that already seen previously and makes it take on new meanings.
The whole film is dominated by water, which always has the role of hiding something under its mirror: treasures, a hangover, the naked bodies of two lovers, death by poisoning, childhood memories. Even his absence is part of this interpretation, considering that Luciano is a protagonist who categorically refuses to hide his thoughts and life choices, in fact being a drunkard always seen while drinking alcohol [spoiler]except when he no longer looks like himself when we find him in Argentina, only to stop speaking Spanish and return to what we had known up to there after a sip of brandy.[/spoiler] The soundtrack swaps the role of the sung tracks with the instrumental tracks (in the first part the popular songs and the Roman ditty give context to the setting while devilish percussion pieces underline the emotional state of a scene, vice versa in the second part in Argentina) but it constantly maintains its own internal consistency. The photography goes from the warm colors of the Lazio countryside to the cold colors of the Argentine desolation, but continues to make use of natural light that cuts the faces into sharp chiaroscuro and makes resemble the environments as acquerello paintings, giving the whole film a gloomy and hopeless atmosphere. Finally, the apotheosis of this synthesis is as anticipated at the beginning of the film on its ending, [spoiler]when we discover that an almost imperceptible whisper in one ear was actually a premonition and the treasure is no longer the Gold of the Crab nor the possibility of returning home, but forgiveness for one's sins committed in the past.[/spoiler]

A very successful anomaly, dry to the point of not wasting even a shot and never self-pleasing in any scene, so that the power of these is constantly at a high level. Suffice it to mention the one [spoiler]in which Luciano, fasting for 4 days, feeds on the pages and ink of a story, which will give him the strength not to give up, and[/spoiler] which alone reveals the importance that the film wants to attach to the role that stories play in our lives.

>The doctor's son is half mad. With fire and fury he has done justice.