Three Crowns of the Sailor
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Three Crowns of the Sailor (Template:Lang-fr) is a 1983 French fantasy film directed by Raúl Ruiz.
Plot
The film opens with a murder of a professor committed by his student in Warsaw. The black and white scene is alternately narrated by the protagonist of the film known simply as the "Sailor" and the student. The student walks through war torn Warsaw when he meets the Sailor, simply known as "The Other", who offers him an escape from the country through a boat job. They enter a bar to negotiate the deal; the student agrees to listen to his story and give him 3 crowns.
The Sailor starts his story- depicted in colored film- he is offered a job by a local swindler known as the blind man. He would later find the blind man dying on the side of the road being stabbed, yet telling him that everything that he sees is a lie. The sailor seems to brush it off and go about his final day in Valparaiso. With his departure from home, he leaves his sister and mother to work on the ship, the Funchalense. this mysterious apparition of a ship contains even stranger inhabitants. The sailors who run the ship are tattooed with solitary letters and supposedly never defecate. On one occasion, the sailor claims to have been imprisoned in another sailor's body, and as he wanders around the boat in bewilderment, encounters multiple visions of himself from this different perspective.
Those who work on the ship are able to eat and eat, yet they never defecate. There is one instance where a sailor throws himself overboard because he is tired of living on the boat, yet the next day he is back on the deck and acting as if nothing had ever happened. Those who live on the boat do not adhere to the laws of nature, as they sweat maggots and on one occasion, the sailor claims to have been imprisoned in another sailor's body, and as he wanders around the boat in bewilderment, encounters multiple visions of himself from this different perspective.
The student at multiple points throughout the sailor's story interrupts him to either question his logic or tell him that he has heard this story time and time again. His attention is slipping as he can physically see him getting drowsy and bored as he waits to escape this place from which he has recently killed someone. The student's lack of patience does not deter the sailor from his pace of progress through his tale of his life.
The story continues to unfold through the sailor's multiple docking experiences. The sailors go from port to port as they sail around the world, and in these different ports, our sailor goes on different adventures. He befriends and becomes the benefactor of a prostitute in a brothel who calls herself “The Virgin Mary”. Her room is filled with demonic looking porcelain dolls. He falls in love with an erotic dancer femme-fatale named Mathilde. She comes to haunt him for years to come after they separate due to her se desirable yet only having one orifice. In Singapore he finds the love of a small boy who is actually an old doctor thousands of years old in a youthful body, and adopts him as his son. Finally, he meets a wise man in Africa who he feels is a paternal figure and wishes to explain his life and philosophy to him, but it would take too much time to do so.
A common motif in all of the sailor’s tales is that he has to borrow money in order to go on and progress through his adventures. Before he could live a happy life with his son, his lover, his to be wife, his father, and his solitude, he must pay off all of his debts that he made on the boat. He wins most of the money that he borrowed back through a gambling game he plays with those who he is indebted too, with the exception of three Danish crowns. After the student has paid off his debts of listening to the sailor's tale and giving him the three Danish crowns, he demands his payment, and when the sailor tells him he hasn't earned the job, the student bludgeons the sailor to death. The sailor reappears on the boat as a phantom and the student understands the true price of the job. The film ends by concluding that there must be one live sailor among a boat of dead men as they sail off into the open ocean.
