"Three Crowns" expresses Ruiz's feelings towards acclimating to life in Paris after leaving Chile in exile. The duality of the living and the dead represented on the Funchalense, a ghost ship redolent of the "Caleuche" and "Flying Dutchman" myths (the latter hinted at by composer Jorge Arriagada's elements of Wagnerian pastiche), is representative of the diaspora after the 1973 military coup abruptly ended President Salvador Allende's democratic attempt to integrate socialism into Chilean political culture. The sailor is leaving his home city of Valparaíso to journey the world with a crew of dead sailors. All the crewmembers on the Funchalense are unable to return to their homes and thus rather than having a nationality, they belong to the boat. This is a symbolic representation of having to leave behind your nationality in a foreign land. 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).