Ticket of No Return (1979)

Director: Ulrike Ottinger

Screenplay: Ulrike Ottinger

Cast: Tabea Blumenschein as Sie; Lutze as Trinkerin vom Zoo; Magdalena Montezuma asSoziale Frage; Orpha Termin as Exakte Statistik; Monika von Cube as Gesunder Menschenverstand; Paul Glauer as Zwerg; Nina Hagen as Sängerin in Taxifahrerkneipe; Günter Meisner as Direktor Willi

No net and drunk as well.

Note: This film was viewed as part of the virtual film festival We Are One, an admirable project between May 29th and June 7th 2020 where in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, major film festivals such as the Berlin International Film Festival here for Ticket of No Return came together to screen films for free internationally on YouTube. Hopefully these films will be easy to locate in the time afterwards. Hopefully this type of festival will also be more common.

Ticket of No Return begins with our almost mute protagonist, only called "She" (Tabea Blumenschein), arriving as a foreigner to Berlin. Her sole intention is to drink as much as possible, deliberately planning her tourism to go around as many places that sell alcohol as possible. Ticket of No Return is a transgressive feminist film as it is entirely about a woman making herself an outsider by self destructive alcoholism. Alcoholism in cinema is usually, as it is depicted with male characters, a downward spiral like The Long Weekend (1945), Billy Wilder's film having Ray Milland eventually in a nightmarish alcohol rehabilitation ward hallucinating about bats. Ticket of No Return also depicts the protagonist's journey as being as self destructive and tragic but, with the gender of the characters a significant change, it reveals the wanton and unruly drunken woman as a middle finger to conventional gendered values.

Immediately we are also set up with a strange depiction of Berlin, where card trick playing bellboys try to sell you nude female playing cards and how a man wanders into a bar with a coat with bread loaves attached to it, a mass of them which he and any one can lean onto and take a bite of any. "She" herself, in vast contrast to the drab and naturalist urban Berlin environments, dresses in striking and vivid costumes that belong in her own world, changing them in each scene. Also revealing the film's hand is three women, giving unconventional names like "Common Sense", who are a wandering Greek chorus of conservative values, on the information and perception of alcoholism, as they are meant to be speakers at anti-alcoholism conventions. They as well are the traditional view of women which scoffs at "She" being so unbecoming in her public drunkenness. On the other hand, "She" does acquire a friend, a homeless woman who she invites into a cafe and acquires a drinking buddy who becomes close to her, a ruckus and catching the attention of random photographers before going on their journey together.

The film saddles the line  between being a series of vignettes and existing in its own dream logic, which is befitting as there is an entire segment which can be boiled down to "She" daydreaming an entire passage of the film whilst sat down in the park. The journey for "She" is a journey deliberately undermining stereotypes of femininity; baring her discomfort at seeing her own face, which probes at a psychology underneath, Blumenschein's figure is a woman who is entirely driven by the Bacchanalian act of drunkenness, wondering to and fro anywhere where she can drink. Be it a lesbian bar, which manages to shown one of the Greek chorus is more sympathetic as she accepts a dance, or even barging into a meal of the most stereotypical German iconography you could put together - lederhosen, sauerkraut in a giant mountain on a big plate with sausages buried into its side, and even a man yodelling as the background music.

Having seen Freak Orlando (1981), this film follows a similar structure of vignettes which feel connected in their own logic. It is fascinating that, as her career went on, Ottinger became entrenched in documentaries, all of immense for me and having a fascination with the unique cultures of the world, be it a lengthy depiction of yak and reindeer nomads in the northern land of the Mongols (Taiga (1992)) or Prater (2007), a documentary about the world's oldest amusement park. She is here definitely in the realm of a cult, experimental movie but you can still see, in the midst of the weirdness, her fascination with subject matter that would befit a future documentarian. This for her is clearly her document on alcoholism, filled with passages talking about the subject, facts about alcoholism, and by the end a book being passed between random characters about an alcoholic's proclamations, ("Drinkers are travellers, who are moved without moving..."), all part of an ode to the marginalised and especially women.

As in Freak Orlando, she clearly has a love for circus folk, turning to them here during the day dream, alongside the inspired tangent of Blumenschein participating in drunken stunt work, being intoxicated whilst riding the front of a car as it runs through a burning wall of beer bottle crates. There is even a musical sequence, and a musical nature to the film at points, where scenes can have sounds like metal spiral staircases became percussion. Then Nina Hagen appears and everything is even more awesome. Hagen, a legendary East German post punk singer, is a figure who even in her older age still has an aura, all because she was always an unique individual who stood out and subverted expectations before you even hear her sing. Even her cameo here perfectly sets up themes of the film - that she sings a cabaret song at a bar where she both relishes being drunk on a night's bender, but also narrates being raped and being ignored by the police when she tried to inform them, one song really getting to a sincere feminist idea of "unfeminine" behaviour, the other hand also how society cruelly tends to treat women like garbage at times, especially if they do not act in social manners.

Aside from this, Ticket of No Return is a mood piece, one where the inevitability of "She's" journey is sad. It is a relish to see the drinking, but collapsing on a stone stairway where she is walked over by people, alcoholism is still self destructive to the body and the liver, alongside even drinking benders being liable to leave one useless if indulged in. But it sees the burning passion of it first, as you sympathise with these women. Even if they later fracture in their relationship, the initial bond between "She" and the homeless woman where the former shows random kindness to the later is sweet in itself. That the film never reaches a dramatic crescendo fits too; it never goes for a trite ending, with "She" collapsed soused on the staircases enough of a conclusion for her, whilst the Greek chorus leaves Berlin, hypocritically talking about the next convention but also its wine selection as they leaves, the day-to-day world from the beginning to the end just going on whilst we have been seeing outsiders move around within it. It is a sad film, but the rush of the experience is still exciting and meaningful.

Abstract Spectrum: Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low