Films I Love #10: Three Crowns of the Sailor (Raoul Ruiz, 1983)

The hallucinatory, poetic visuals of Raoul Ruiz's Three Crowns of the Sailor slowly unfurl the contours of the chilling story that a sailor (Jean-Bernard Guillard) tells to a fellow nighttime wanderer (Philippe Deplanche) over the course of an evening of drunken conversation. As befits this boozy storytelling, the film is continually adrift, its narrative as hazy as Ruiz's sun-drenched visuals, which bathe the film in bright, brilliant sun glare that obscures more than it illuminates. The fractured narrative conspires with this gauzy aesthetic, and with Ruiz's self-consciously quirky sense of camera placement, in order to thoroughly destabilize the viewer. There is no steady mooring, and the viewer quickly becomes as lost as the man who is hearing this story. Over the course of the film, as the sailor describes his adventures aboard a mysterious vessel, the story's outline and purpose become clearer, evoking various seafaring legends while leading towards a final moment of recognition that's narratively satisfying but somewhat beside the point. This fractured story is, at most, a foundation for Ruiz, who uses the sailor's tale of woe primarily as an excuse for his dazzling flights of visual imagination.