The film opens in stark black-and-white, depicting a nameless Polish seaport in 1958 where a professor is killed in a motiveless act by a student Philippe Deplanche. The student wanders the war-torn streets until he crosses paths with a sailor Jean-Bernard Guillard who offers him passage from the country in exchange for hearing the sailor’s life story and for three Danish crowns. They drift into a smoky dancehall to seal the deal, where the student agrees to listen—but the price is steep, and the sailor’s tale must be paid in full before the berth is earned.
The sailor’s story unfolds in vivid color, a dreamlike odyssey that is repeatedly interrupted by the student’s skepticism and nagging assurances that he has heard these tales before. It begins in Valparaíso, where a local swindler known as “the blind man” promises a berth aboard a ship called the Funchalense, only to be found dying shortly after. Undeterred, the sailor secures his place on board and bids farewell to his mother Adelaide João and his sister as the voyage begins. On the ship, the crew bears striking tattoos—letters inked across their bodies—while a ritual of eating without salt and a strange affectation of sweating maggots paints a surreal, almost grimly comic portrait of life at sea. One crew member throws himself overboard, only to reappear the next day, insisting that it was “The Other” who jumped. At times the sailor finds himself inhabiting that Other’s body, wandering the deck as if living through an alternate self, a disorienting echo of his own life.
As the Funchalense sails from port to port, the sailor’s fortunes grow and falter in turn. In Buenaventura, he befriends a shy, gum-chewing, doll-collecting prostitute named María Nadège Clair who is famous for being the “Virgin Mary” in the eyes of those who seek her company. In Singapore, a French proconsul introduces him to a small boy who actually turns out to be a venerable doctor, a figure the sailor adopts as his son Wong Yu Wai. The voyage brings a miraculous twist when the ship sinks and later resurfaces, and it leads to the discovery of a replacement mother who is a stowaway aboard, followed by two criminal brothers in Tangier. When the sailor returns to Valparaíso, he discovers that his own mother and sister have vanished and that the world around him has grown stranger still, punctuated by his encounter with an eccentric Portuguese travelling salesman André Gomes and by his growing fascination with Matilde, a mambo-dancing femme fatale whose mouth is a singularly defining feature Lisa Lyon.
In Tampico, a scholarly boy who has ostensibly lived the sailor’s life through literature crosses the sailor’s path, and in Dakar, a wise man offers paternal counsel while asking for three Danish crowns. A persistent thread running through the sailor’s adventures is debt: time and again he borrows money to keep his life afloat, dreaming of one day owning a bar and settling among a makeshift family of companions. Yet the debts accumulate, and most of the money he wins is gambled back away, save for the elusive three crowns.
The finale returns to the dancehall, where the sailor and the student drain the three Danish crowns from the murdered professor’s house and step toward the harbor. The sailor’s life story is complete, and the student—still hungry for his berth—demands his reward. The sailor laughs at the audacity of this demand, and in a chilling turn, the student bludgeons him to death. The sailor’s body vanishes, only to reappear as a phantom aboard the ship, and the student comprehends the true price of a job at sea. The film closes on a dark, enduring image: there must always be one murderous living sailor among a boat of dead men as the Funchalense sails back out into the open sea.
