Synopsis
A sartorially resplendent woman of few words arrives in Berlin with plans to live out the rest of her days as a drunkard.
Ticket of No Return
1979 ‘Bildnis einer Trinkerin’ Directed by Ulrike Ottinger
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Alternative Titles
Portrait of a Female Drunkard, Aller jamais retour
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the mysterious 'she' buys a one way ticket to berlin. young, rich and beautiful, in a series of spectacular outfits 'she' intends to drink herself to death on cognac and champagne in all the finest nightspots and hotels of the city. 'she' picks up a bag lady, gives her a makeover and takes her to a gay bar, continually crossing paths with a greek chorus of uptight tweedy sociologists spouting facts about the dangers of alcohol. interspersed with dreamlike intervals featuring a variety of other odd characters, 'she' never speaks. ottinger shoots this mayhem with a painterly eye; at times hilarious, at times disturbing, always unforgettable
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Single, loaded, gorgeous, ridiculously overdressed and imbued with all the antiquity of a Medea, Beatrice and Iphigenia, Tabea Blumenschein heads to Berlin as her last port of call to get herself utterly arseholed on cognac. In a flurry of outsize bows, pillbox hats, tinfoil wraps and outfits that would work for an Etihad stewardess, she throws back the turps like there's no tomorrow, goes stunt-driving, encounters a giggly Nina Hagen doing operetta, an acerbic Kurt Raab who fires her from his law firm after one day, Eddie Constantine quoting Gertrude Stein while everyone nibbles his passed-out offsider's challah necklace in a sea of broken crockery, and a bevy of bookish stick-in-the-mud agony aunts hold forth with statistics on alcoholism and…
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breaking bad
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Wes Anderson, Almodovar and Fassbinder Walk Into a Bar...Liquid distortion. "Her resolve to live out a narcissistic, pessimistic cult of solitude strengthened... until it reached the level at which it could be lived." You and me both, sister! This is the kind of thing you shouldn't show to someone who thinks arthouse movies are all scene after scene of highly stylized but impenetrable nonsense. In other words, it's great.
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"Our addictions are just the Erinyes in the theater of cruelty."
Well, I thought The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press was pretty fantastic but somehow this is even better. Again, many Fassbinder regulars appear (Kurt Raab, Eddie Constantine, and Peer Raben even does the music), and while it's tempting to compare Ottinger to the great German New Wave director, it would also be a huge disservice to her own clearly singular and unique talent.
Even putting her in a box like "radical feminist filmmaker" feels insufficient and limiting. Obviously, there is a strong political subtext going on here, but it's fairly subtle and understated. Well okay maybe not exactly, but at the very least it's didactic in…
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The old cinema is dead, and this film is the high camp filth-mongering anti-bourgeoisie queer social commentary that we all still need and deserve. Catching so many elements that have been referenced and misappropriated elsewhere as recently as Lady Gaga's Met Gala camp is truly illuminating. This reinvigorated a trash punk anti-capitalist string in me, I left the theater wanting to drink cognac and wear elaborate gowns while I trash talk elitist swine and spit in their faces.
(btw I made the poster!)
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52 films by women 2020: 47/52.
I'd wanted to see an Ulrike Ottinger film for ages, preferably one of the big matriarchal fantasy epics like Joan of Arc of Mongolia or Madame X - An Absolute Ruler. I did not bank on my first encounter with her being this less well-known study of alcoholism, which gets about three lines in the recent Frieze magazine retrospective of her work. But if this - the first of her "Berlin trilogy", and it's always a good sign when an artist has one of those - is one of her minor works, it certainly whets the appetite for her major ones.
Tabea Blumenschein both stars and designed the elaborate costumes, wandering through a series…
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La Dolce Vita’s weird, feminist little sister
I know this is missing the point because there’s a lot of great commentary on how alcoholism intersects with femininity and class, but I can’t help thinking of how trippy this would be to watch while drunk lol
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Sharing multiple cast and crew with the more famous Rainer Werner Fassbinder (actress Magdalena Montezuma, composer Peer Raben, editor Ila von Hasperg), director Ulrike Ottinger shares some of Fassbinder's more radical cinematic attitudes while also taking her style in a more experimental direction. Ottinger apparently called this the female counterpoint to Fassbinder's work, which applies both to its similarities and its differences.
(Fun fact: There's also a rare appearance from Paul Glauer, better known for his appearance in Werner Herzog's Even Dwarfs Started Small. His third and final major appearance was also in an Ulrike Ottinger film, Freak Orlando.)
A visual spectacle, Ticket of No Return thrives in its use of light and color, almost to the point of cartoonish…
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Tabea Blumenscheid (extremely focused on drinking) steps through Berlin in extravagant gowns, doing some sort of drink-seeing of the city, while being followed by three lesbians representing a modern, hypercapitalist rendering of the goddesses of fate („social question“, „common sense“, „exact statistic“) and ignoring everybody except a homeless lady who becomes her drinking buddy and bff - so yes exactly its a work of genius