Les trois couronnes du matelot

  • 117'
  • France
  • 1983
Ruiz's first major commercial success within the arthouse circuit of his adopted France, Three Crowns introduced a heady set of elements that he would work through for a subsequent half a dozen films: perverse fairy tale and ghost-ship fantasies; a mélange of high and low culture literary sources; convoluted, multi-perspectival narratives of murder, wanderlust and loss of identity; and the superimposition of European and Latin American mythologies.The film is indeed a florid, exotic brew: Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner rubs shoulders with Last Year at Marienbad, Hans Christian Andersen, Dylan Thomas, Edgar Allan Poe, and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Not forgetting Orson Welles, whose post-synchronised sound designs and baroque deep-space visuals are lovingly extended by Ruiz, and whose ghost brings in a further set of associations to Isak Dinesen, Cervantes, Stevenson, Conrad and Melville.The plot may be literally all over the map, but Three Crowns finds its poetic unity in a rigorous logic of paradox, inversion, exchange and the fluid co-existence of seemingly incompatible opposites: life and death, self and other, word and image, past and present. Even the human body becomes a monstrous collage (or moveable feast), as in the memorable dance by Lisa Lyon. Adrian Martin
  • 117'
  • France
  • 1983
Director
Raúl Ruiz
Country of production
France
Year
1983
Festival Edition
IFFR 2004
Length
117'
Medium
35mm
International title
Three Crowns of the Sailor
Language
French
Producers
INA - institut nat. de l'audiovisuel, Antenne 2
Sales
INA - institut nat. de l'audiovisuel
Screenplay
François Ede, Raúl Ruiz
Editor
Valeria Sarmiento
Cast
Jean Badin
Director
Raúl Ruiz
Country of production
France
Year
1983
Festival Edition
IFFR 2004
Length
117'
Medium
35mm
International title
Three Crowns of the Sailor
Language
French
Producers
INA - institut nat. de l'audiovisuel, Antenne 2
Sales
INA - institut nat. de l'audiovisuel
Screenplay
François Ede, Raúl Ruiz
Editor
Valeria Sarmiento
Cast
Jean Badin