They go into a dancehall to wine and dine while they negotiate the deal; the student agrees to listen to the sailor's life story as part of the payment and then to give him three Danish crowns.
The story begins in Valparaíso where, in search of employment, the sailor is told about a possible place on board a ship called the Funchalense by a local swindler known as "the blind man", whom he later finds stabbed and dying.
In Buenaventura, he befriends and becomes the benefactor of a shy, gum-chewing, doll-collecting, Corín Tellado-reading prostitute named María whom others have called "The Virgin Mary".
When he returns to Valparaíso, he finds his actual mother and sister have disappeared, encounters an eccentric Portuguese travelling salesman, and then falls in lust with the mambo dancer Matilde, a femme fatale whose mouth is her only orifice.
The conversation framing the sailor's journey is mostly denoted by a black and white filter reminiscent of film noir, while the tale itself unfolds in rich colour.
Cinematographer Sacha Vierny also uses a variety of cinematic techniques ranging from split-focus diopter, dolly zooms, Dutch tilts and Milton Caniff-inspired mise-en-scène.
The cinematic style of the film evokes Ruiz's meditations on the "image-situation" and the method of propagating thought through audiovisual schemas rather than through the transparent plots prescribed by "central conflict theory".
[3] Bérénice Reynaud has also pointed out the literary and cinematic works that Ruiz is drawing on in the film: from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Erich Maria Remarque's The Night in Lisbon (1962) and the writings of Hans Christian Andersen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Selma Lagerlöf, Karen Blixen, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar to the Orson Welles films The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Mr. Arkadin (1955) and The Immortal Story (1968).
[6] Ruiz later claimed it was his least favorite of his own films, due to the fact that he had adhered to a conventional script when making it, rather than creating scenes that simply "wanted to exist".