Ulrike Ottinger's films are so expensive to buy and so difficult to stream that I actually broke down and purchased a trial subscription to the Criterion Channel when I saw that they were offering up a beautiful HD version of Ticket Of No Return. Even though I had viewed almost everything available on the channel's streaming platform, I couldn't resist the opportunity to finally rewatch one of a handful of films that had really spun my noodle around when it came to what I thought I knew about cinema. I needed to know if I would find it as uncompromising and fearless as when I first watched it four decades ago.
Ticket of No Return is essentially non-narrative, or perhaps I should say "anti-narrative" insofar as it obliterates the main character's past. If the viewers are to understand the protagonist's obstinate, drunken safari, they must decipher a parade of images so stunningly realized and meticulously composed that they risk getting lost in the film's surface pleasure alone. Still, there is nothing gratuitous about what we are viewing: each and every frame is pregnant with meaning, a profound meditation on female subjectivity and the way ideology perpetuates itself, fencing in everyone, regardless of gender, age, or social status. And despite how hilarious and superficially appealing it may be, it's a movie that demands visual literacy and scrutiny, which is probably why, after the first time I saw it four decades ago, ninety percent of the audience had walked out by the time the lights went up.
The film follows the nameless main character, played with smashmouth bravado by Tabea Blumenschein, on her shitfaced blitzkrieg through Berlin circa 1979. Always attired in the most preposterous haute couture, she moves through the city like a bulldozer, picking up an inebriated homeless woman along the way who serves as a sort of alter ego and reminder of the dangerous undertaking she has embarked on. She stumbles down filthy city streets with a champagne bottle in her hand, staggers into gay bars and performance art venues, continually hurling her brandy snifters against any and all reflective surfaces she encounters. Along the way, she runs into a virtual supergroup of European art-house stars and musicians, including Eddie Constantine, Nina Hagen, and even the great Volker Spengler, tarted up in drag in a nod to his stunning performance as an abused transgendered woman in Fassbinder's In a year of 13 Moons.
Except for a moment when she tells Eddie Constantine that she speaks English, Tabea's character remains mute throughout the film, insolently channeling Harpo Marx as she defies authority and convention at all cost. She's followed through the city by a trio of female intellectuals all wearing, significantly, black and white houndstooth overcoats: a sort of Greek chorus as well as a reminder of the ubiquitous, institutionalized power of ideology. As Tabea's exploits become more and more reckless -- she performs a high wire act with circus performers, drives a car through a flaming brick wall -- the chorus is always there, like a nagging authoritarian gatekeeper reminding her of where pathology originates and highlighting the fatal implications involved in Tabea's mad quest to lay claim to her own agency.
Ticket of No Return starts and ends with a pair of matching shots. In the opening scene, we see Tabea from behind, in stylish high heels, walking away from the camera and over the reflective surface of a marble floor. At the end of the film, the shot repeats, but Tabea is now in a hall of mirrors, and as she moves away from the spectator, the sharp points of her newly weaponized high heels dig into the mirrored surface of the floor, crushing it into tiny shards. Tabea is destroying the way her reflection is used, mediated, interpreted. This final act of defiance reminds us that she is now in charge of her own identity, that intoxication and madness are sometimes the only ways to break the chains that ideology imposes on us, to step beyond that which is limiting us so that we may see clearly, just like Tabea, who's never afraid to look into the mirror and laugh.
Forty years later and the second viewing of this film has moved me even more than the first. If you have to, watch it for nothing more than its gorgeous visual style and gut-busting, surreal humor. And don't listen to the Richard Linklater intro. Waste of time.
