A Chilean sailor persuades a Polish student who has just committed a brutal murder to listen to his life story and pay him three Danish krone in exchange for his place on The Funchalense. The sailor drunkenly recounts his macabre life on board and his adventures in exotic ports and brothels.
Tall tales are exhumed from the drunken fog of memory in this hallucinatory maritime adventure in storytelling from Raúl Ruiz. The fractured narrative design and dazzling, poetic visuals lend the destabilizing sense of being at sea, albeit in a vessel clearly being steered by a cinematic master.