THREE CROWNS OF THE SAILOR

A callow student, scared stiff of the consequences of the murder he has just committed, allows himself to be dragged to a dance hall by a a mysterious sailor marked for death who insists on making the shaken youth a captive audience to the recounting of his life story, a surreal trawl through ports of call and seedy brothels across Latin America. Gradually, the student is drawn into a nocturnal voyage of uncanny encounters, temporal slips, and philosophical riddles. Prolific Chilean director Raúl Ruiz’s magical realist classic is a spellbinding labyrinth of stories within stories, a ghostly maritime fable that drifts between an ocean vessel and the far reaches of memory. 

“Paradoxes build on paradoxes and logic on illogic… And yet the game has a serious end, building toward a world stripped of substance, in which everything signifies but nothing means.” – Dave Kehr, The Chicago Reader