Three Crowns of the Sailor

Three Crowns of the Sailor

(Les trois couronnes du matelot, 1983, French with English subtitles, Facets)

That even well informed cineastes are largely unfamiliar with the name of filmmaker Raúl Ruiz is surprising on two fronts, both for the consistent quality of his work and for the sheer volume of it. With 76 films to his name since fleeing his native Chile when Pinochet came to power in 1974 (not to mention his theater work), Ruiz long maintained a pace that makes Takashi Miike look like a slacker. But aside from recent films like Three Lives and Only One Death and his adaptation of Time Regained, his work has been difficult to see in North America outside of film festivals: Little of it has even been available on home video. Hopefully the release on DVD of this early Ruiz masterpiece will begin to remedy that.

Concerned as is much of Ruiz’ work with the nature of storytelling, Three Crowns weaves an elaborate series of tales that would take longer to describe than it would to watch. A young man fleeing a senseless crime is offered escape by a sailor, but only on the condition that he spend the night listening to the sailor’s life story. Struggling to find a connective thread among the various episodes (all inspired by seafaring tales Ruiz heard from his father, a ship’s captain), the young man too late realizes that they are linked to his own fate.

First-time viewers tend to be disorientated by the seemingly random nature of the stories that make up Three Crowns. What keeps you watching at first is a playful visual style (photographed by the sublime Sacha Vierney) that both amplifies and alleviates this quality. Ruiz seldom photographs a scene from the same position twice; even the simplest cross-cutting often brings you back to a slightly different view. More noticeably, he enjoys composing deep-focus shots with the camera stationed in the unlikeliest places he can put it: behind the cue ball on a pool table in a barroom where a conversation is taking place, for instance, or on top of a man’s ear. As delightful as it is dense, Three Crowns will hopefully be the first in a DVD series of this unique filmmaker’s work to find the audience it has long deserved.

—m. faust

100% Arabica

(1997, in French with English subtitles, Facets)

Earlier this year, Paris’ industrial suburbs were convulsed by the protests and riots of Arab and Muslim youth reacting ferociously to a perceived social and economic suppression in contemporary France. Mahmoud Zemmouri’s breezy, amusing 1997 film doesn’t really “predict” these events, although it can induce an uneasy recognition that political and religious tensions and controversies arising from Islam’s interactions with the West were on the rise well before 9/11.

100% Arabica is at least a little like a more politically realistic, socially more frank version of Flashdance. In one of those Parisian suburbs that later erupted in violence, Islamists and secular youth, and their elders, clash over the encroaching influence of popular music and allied mores.

The engaging movie features French pop stars Khaled and Cheb Mami and their rai music, a bumping blend of North African, rock and hip-hop. American youngsters might be amused, if they’d tolerate subtitles. The DVD also includes the short comic film “Rotating Square” from Egypt.

—george sax

Homecoming

(2005, Anchor Bay)

Like almost every fantasy anthology series that has followed The Twilight Zone, Showtime’s Masters of Horror is more hit than miss. But “Homecoming,” the episode written by UB graduate Sam Hamm (Batman) and directed by Joe Dante (Gremlins) is a keeper. The co-creators have an axe to grind, and they bury it squarely in the foreheads of the current administration and its supporters.

In a plot derived from Bob Clark’s Vietnam era horror flick Deathdream—itself inspired by the classic short story “The Monkey’s Paw”—soldiers slain in Iraq return home as zombies, determined to undermine the immoral government that ordered them to their meaningless deaths. Hamm and Dante pull no punches, and their targets include Ann Coulter (actress Thea Gill isn’t over the top enough) and Karl Rove in particular, and the Bush League in general.

The tone is humorous, as one would expect from Dante, but genuine horror is achieved when the soldiers rise from their flag-draped coffins, and when they summon re-enforcements after Republicans steal yet another election. It’s much more satisfying than George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead. Though the film itself is under an hour, the disk is crammed with extra features.

—greg lamberson