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Three Crowns of the Sailor
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Three Crowns of the
Sailor was Raúl Ruiz’s first major commercial
success within the European arthouse circuit; it quickly became a 1980s
classic. It introduced a set of elements that the director conitinued to work
through in projects including City of
Pirates (1983), The Insomniac on the
Alma Bridge (1985) and Manoel on the
Island of Marvels (two versions for film and TV, 1984 and 1985).
According
to Raphaël Bassan, these elements comprise “a mélange of cultural sources
(cinema, comics, French, Anglo-Saxon and Latin American novels); a mise en abyme of narrative elements;
polyculturality; non-psychological definition of characters; occultation of
sexuality reinforced by an insistent nostalgia for the parental home; the theme
of the double; and the omnipresence of death”. (1)
Speaking
of that mélange of cultural sources, the fantastic storyline of Three Crowns of the Sailor, which is
quite impossible to summarise, is conjured from just about every story, novel
or film that has ever had anything to do with the sea and its myriad
mythologies. It has sailors and drunken boats, fantasy women in every port,
crusty old storytellers. I was surprised not to hear Procol Harum’s “A Salty
Dog” burst onto the soundtrack! It's a tale of eternal exile and wandering, and
recurring “immortal stories” of loss and revenge.
The
film takes elements from a vast expanse
of literature, including Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, sea shanties,
Hans Christian Andersen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dylan Thomas, and Edgar Allan
Poe. And it also draws from a wide range of cinema: Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961), Albert
Lewin’s remarkable fantasy Pandora and
the Flying Dutchman (1951), and the intoxicating films of the French Poetic
Realism movement in the 1940s.
But
the key inspiration for Ruiz is surely Orson Welles: he re-invents the master’s
baroque, deep-focus visuals, as well as
his elaborately post-synchronised soundtracks. And via Welles comes another
stream of literary references: Isak Dinesen (aka Karen Blixen), Cervantes,
Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville.
Of
all Ruiz’s films, Three Crowns of the
Sailor is the one most devoted to the wild possibilities of supernatural
storytelling, endless fantasies, dreams and memories jostling each other. Ruiz
understands what, say, How to Make an American Quilt (1995) does not:
that stories float, multiply and transmute, that they belong to no single
storyteller. With all its many references to cinema and literature, it is no
wonder that François Thomas described it as “a mosaic seemingly scattered to
the four winds”.
Yet
Thomas rightly intuited a unity here: a rigorous sytem founded on paradox,
inversion, exchange and the fluid co-existence of seemingly incompatible
opposites – life and death, Self and Other, word and image, past and present. (2)
This seemingly overripe, busy, baroque movie indeed has an intense poetic
logic, built upon recurring and metamorphosing images of nature and of the
body. The sound design – powered by Jorge Arriagada’s characteristically florid
musical score – pulls everything together, as is often the case with Ruiz.
Zuzana
Pick, taking a postcolonial perspective, praised the “perverse erotic charge of
the film” which, for her, resided in the “fascinating insistence on the
tropical settings of the Third World”, positioned as “the exotic Other of
Western representation”. A properly second-degree representation (his cinema is
full such elaborate “exoticisms”) to which Ruiz adds “an eccentric and
decentring integration of European elements”. (3)
But
it is best not to intellectualise, rationalise or decode Ruiz’s films entirely;
you have to surrender to them, abandon yourself to their strange rhythms and
apparitions, and their truly infectious, oddball humour.
Derived from, in
part, material prepared for the January-June 1993 Australian Film
Institute/Carnivale retrospective season The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz, which the filmmaker attended in Melbourne
and Sydney during February ‘93.
1.
Raphaël Bassan, “Raúl Ruiz”, La revue du
cinéma, no. 409 (October 1985), p. 47.
2.
François Thomas, “Les trois couronnes du
matelot”, Positif, no. 274 (December
1983), pp. 36-38.
3.
Zuzana M. Pick, “The Dialectical Wanderings of Exile”, Screen, Vol. 30 No. 4 (1989), pp. 46-65.
© Adrian Martin January 1993 / May 1996 |
