Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983)

Director: Raúl Ruiz

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Students commit mad and meaningless acts, sailors tell the tallest stories. When one of the former, having murdered his tutor, meets one of the latter at the start of Ruiz's film, the images are in muddy green sepia; but as the sailor begins his extraordinary life story - listening is his price for granting the youth safe passage on a departing ship - the movie becomes literally and figuratively more colourful. Story piles upon story, scenes grow vivid and dissolve, characters come and go as in a dream. No one speaks or behaves as they would in 'real life', for that is neither the territory nor the objective of Ruiz's cinema; his is a hypothetical world, governed by the reversal of narrative expectations. The sailor's tale begins in Valparaiso, and revisits in flashback the various ports of call in a lifetime's voyaging, each of which yields its own strange story. The elements of the sailor's yarn are timeless and universal: family ties, journeying away from home, sex, violence, and death. Ruiz conjures them into a poetic parable on the theme of debts long unpaid and finally called in... A vigorous imagination is at work here in the tradition of Cocteau, Fellini, Tarkovsky; open your eyes and your mind to it. A dream of a picture, in every sense.

Author: MA 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: Raúl Ruiz

Producer: Jean Lefaux, Maya Feuillette, José Luís Vasconcelos

Cast: Jean-Bernard Guillard, Philippe Deplanche, Nadége Clair, Lisa Lyon, Jean Badin, Claude Dereppe full cast

Duration: 122 mins


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.