• Raul Ruiz is a very worthy Orson Welles acolyte and Three Crowns of the Sailor is certainly among his greatest achievements.
  • The Chilean auteur’s most important collaborator here is French cinematographer Sacha Vierny. Vierny worked with Resnais on Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad. Vierny would be Peter Greenaway’s most trusted ally as well- working on A Zed & Two Noughts, The Belly of an Architect and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover– all of Greenaway’s most essential works.
  • Ruiz employs both color and black and white photography.
  • This is the surrealistic trek from a drunken sailor told in flashback. The memories are in color- the storytelling in the present tense is in black and white. Voiceover is used and there is a femme fatale so there is noir here. One of Ruiz’s favorite cinematic tools (and he has a lot of tricks in his bag) are the Wellesian angles. There is one early- shot from a low angle tilted up at the ornately lit ceiling of the grand theater. Ruiz’s camera is active and untethered- Kalatozov feels like an influence. This is Iñárritu before Iñárritu- Ruiz is a stylistic maximalist. The narrative matches this— adventure, freemasons, murder, jails, bars.
  • Ruiz specializes in the foreground/background dichotomy. In one scene it is a beer tap obstructing the mise-en-scene in the foreground, in another a foot, a rooster or a disembodied hand with a cigarette holder. In yet another a ship’s knot is in the foreground. Ruiz is playful using a voice that sounds like Godard’s Alphaville.  Like early Godard, Ruiz is in love with genre—and happy to keep the story foggy, opaque, and enigmatic. Ruiz is trying everything- there is first person point of view camerawork and later he flips the camera upside down to walk on the ceiling. Having said all that, there are some blemishes and spots where Ruiz’ ambitions extend past his execution. On occasion the results are unpolished. In one such spot, a disembodied head takes the mantle for the voiceover with miniature work of a sinking ship. The quality of the miniature work would not pass the grade for miniature work in Hollywood in the 1920s some sixty years before Three Crowns of the Sailor… a miss.

Ruiz specializes in the foreground/background dichotomy. In one scene it is a beer tap obstructing the mise-en-scene in the foreground, in another a foot, a rooster (here) or a disembodied hand with a cigarette holder

  • The Lady from Shanghai being both Welles and partial noir is an important text to Three Crowns of the Sailor. There is a prostitute with a room full of dolls with illuminated eyes. Later there is a room full of globes. The next scene id drenched in a red tint. There is a foreboding existential dread- and an bold aesthetic dedication to the various set pieces- this is Welles’ The Trial.
  • Very few auteurs can match Ruiz’s talent for both camera movement and composition. Split diopters are used in abundance. In one inspired sequence Ruiz’s camera ducks behind a multicolored lantern on a dance floor.
  • The camera floats (Ophuls or Kalatozov) along from the left at the club at the 78-minute mark.
  • A very long take overhead as the sailor passes before the final montage
  • A Must-See film- top five of the year quality