Three Crowns of the Sailor

Chilean-born, French-based director Raul Ruiz's Three Crowns of the Sailor (1982) is a bizarre fantasy incorporating elements of Coleridge's poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the legend of the Flying Dutchman, as a young student, trying to escape arrest for murder, meets a mysterious sailor who insists on the payment of three Danish coins in exchange for the details of his life's story. Once the payment is made, the sailor begins his tales and the film switches, à la The Wizard of Oz, from black-and-white to color. The sailor appears to be the only living member of a ghost ship that endlessly cruises the oceans, stopping at ports populated with the weirdest folk imaginable, before he returns home to find that he is no longer recognized by the people he left behind. The film might have been more successful had Ruiz been working with a larger budget (and imagination); as it is, however, the sailor's stories often seem like tiresome padding to delay the inevitable twist of fate awaiting the homicidal student. Although the DVD extras include a surprisingly entertaining 30-minute interview with Ruiz, this is still not a necessary purchase. (P. Hall)