Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983, M)

(Trois couronnes du matelot) Dir: Raúl Ruiz, 117mins, 16mm

Fleeing an impulse killing, a student crosses paths with a drunken sailor. The sailor offers escape by swapping berths and identities on his next passage out from port – if the student will pay him three Danish crowns and listen to his life’s story/ies. As that happens to be the exact amount the student has just stolen, the sailor sets out to revisit his various ports of call and memory. His stories are full of contradictions (characters suddenly relocate to new lands, ships sunk reappear in new ports); but certain truths and admissions keep reoccurring within them. Ruiz may possibly be drawing on memories of his own father, a merchant captain; whilst film critic Bérénice Reynaud has pointed to the tradition of the sailor’s ‘Immortal Stories’: folk tales of the seas that often involved ghost ships or crews. There is no question that the director is also drawing on a deep library of literary influences – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Jose Luis Borges, Selma Lagerloff’s Nils Holgerson, Hans Christian Andersen, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad; Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Yet there is also no question of just how eccentrically cinematic the film is. Orson Welles’ films The Lady from Shanghai, Mr Arkadin and The Immortal Story are an equal influence, and the film often seems to float free of its own soundtrack, images contradicting words and drifting free in the filters and strange focus planes of cinematographer, Sacha Vierny. Preceded by Ruiz’s early French short film Dog’s Dialogue (Dir: Raúl Ruiz, France, 1977, 22 min, 35mm). From the collection of the NFSA.