Ulrike Ottinger | Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Ticket of No Return) / 1979

toasting goodbye to herself

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ulrike Ottinger (screenwriter and director) Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Ticket of No Return) / 1979

 

German director Ulrike Ottinger’s second feature film, and the first of her renowned “Berlin Trilogy,” begins with a narrator’s voice (Ottinger herself) reciting these lines as the heroine, named by the pronoun “She” only (Ottinger’s former lover, Tabea Blumenschein), comes clattering in high heels across marble floors and down a metal stairway dressed in a swirling red gown:

“She, a woman of exquisite beauty, of classical dignity and harmonious Raphaelesque proportions, a woman, created like no other to be Medea, Madonna, Beatrice, Iphigenia, Aspasia, decided one sunny winter day to leave La Rotonda…

     She purchased a ticket of no return to Berlin-Tegel. She wanted to forget her past, or rather to abandon it like a condemned house. She wanted to concentrate all her energies on one thing, something all her own. To follow her own destiny at last was her only desire. Berlin, a city in which she was a complete stranger, seemed just the place to indulge her passion undisturbed. Her passion was alcohol, she lived to drink and drank to live, the life of a drunkard. Her resolve to live out a narcissistic, pessimistic cult of solitude strengthened during her flight until it reached the level at which it could be lived.

     The time was ripe to put her plans into action.”

 

     Most commentators have noted that what follows is what would describe as an endless Berlin pub crawl—including visits, however, to some of the most chic bars, private clubs, lesbian bars, and any other place that might sell liquor, particularly cognac by the glass—along with a fabulous fashion show featuring Blaumenschein’s own designs. The slow spiral of this woman intentionally  and determinedly seeking death through alcohol is observed with through the endlessly patience camera lens that Ottinger has made so famous, along with the hilariously statistical and

sociological jabber of three women dressed in houndstooth frocks named Social Question (Monika von Cube), Accurate Statistics (Orpha Termin), and Common Sense (Magdalena Montezuma) who follow her, apparently by accident, pontificating on various issues relating to women who drink, alcoholics in general, homosexuality, particularly lesbianism, and any other subject that might cling to the enigmatic “She.” They serve both as chorus and reminders of the traditional values by which She might be judged.

     In her private weave of a drunken fashion show (which The New Times critic Janet Maslin deemed the film to be) both the actor, who is the constant center of almost every scene, and the director force us to confront a vision of woman who certainly in 1979 but even today is seldom represented. And indeed feminist critics have commented extensively on how Ottinger’s focus on her well-dressed “trinker,” pulls to the essence of the woman behind the unknowable being while in its over-the-top excesses, her loutish behavior, her almost other worldly fashion statements, and her utter silence removes her from the standard “male gaze.” As the unnamed commentator for the highly intelligent “Make Mine Criterion” blog nicely summarizes these views [which I quote at length]:

 

“Miriam Hansen maintains that the overriding objective of Ticket of No Return is to disentangle visual pleasure from cinema’s patriarchal hold and Ottinger does so by leaping into the contradictory image of the fabulously adorned Drinker. Exquisitely dressed and beautifully made-up, the Drinker could easily become an object of cinematic fascination, captured by film’s presumptive male gaze as theorized by Laura Mulvey, however the Drinker is too excessive and too unwieldy for such containment. Her outfits are too outlandish, her silence is too deafening, and her devotion to alcohol is too unconventional to be merely contained in a frame of soft-focus and then wondered at. Hansen observes that fashion has consistently been the domain of women, having been excluded from other avenues of artistic expression, but the Drinker’s en vogue style crosses over from art to fetish, revealing by its intensity the repressive power of that beauty and then turning it back on the viewer like a force for resistance. Blumenschien’s costuming confronts the camera’s gaze and by its monochromatic grandeur and stunning architecture, refuses its objectification.

     The Drinker’s iconoclastic aura is not limited to her dress. She drinks to excess, mugs and gesticulates, smashes glasses, has little time for men and befriends unconventional women. Most obviously, she finds a drinking buddy in a homeless woman (Lutze) with whom she shares her refreshments, her clothing, her hotel room, and even her bath. Nina Hagen’s cameo as a bar’s  singer and fellow drinker is also notable, as Hagen had made a splash less than a year earlier with her debut studio album and sparked a media uproar shortly before the film’s release when she explicitly demonstrated female masturbation positions on an Austrian talk show and got into a heated debate with various other panelists. Ottinger’s purposeful resistance to convention spills over from her lead character and into the film’s broader construction, creating an aesthetic that Angela McRobbie calls ‘lesbian punk anti-realism.’

      Ottinger creates a world around the Drinker that is as plainly artificial as her appearance, being full of surrealist flair and self-conscious distanciation. The Drinker’s presence causes travelers’ suitcases to spring open, an airport PA system requests “Reality, please,” and a well-dressed little person (Paul Gaulet) who ushers in moments of unreal fancy. The film proceeds episodically, prizing aesthetics over individuals, emphasizing cinematic space over time, celebrating scenes over their connections, and exploring fantasy. The Drinker smashes plates with Wolf Vostell and Eddie Constantine, crashes a feast of bratwurst and sauerkraut held by alpine yodellers, and disrupts a cruise on the inland waters of Berlin aboard the MS Moby Dick. These and other scenes stand as isolated tableaux alongside various fantasies of the Drinker in which she imagines herself in a number of unconventional roles: as a manly cab driver, a Shakespearean actor, a lip-synched advertising executive, a speedway daredevil. These flamboyant, unpredictable, and often disconnected moments eschew the lulling force of continuity and logic and dismantle the classical Hollywood infrastructure that enables cinema’s male gaze.”

 

     Throughout the film, men and women turn away from the beautifully dressed drunken beauty, waiters and bartenders comment on the rudeness of her sullen silence, and managers of restaurants and boat lines shuffle her off. She exists in a no-man’s-land of her own desire, unwanted, almost untouchable, nearly unfeeling.

      Yet despite herself, she still has a substantial effect on some of the people whose path she crosses. Wherever she goes, men’s suitcases suddenly pop open, spilling their contents to the floor. A dwarf appears and reappears throughout the film, bearing her trays of food, a portrait of himself, and other gifts, all of which She receives without any comments. But most importantly She seems attracted to and actually interested in a homeless person (Lutze), whose trolley the cab that takes her from the airport into the city destroyed, and whom later she invites in to share her drinks in an upscale restaurant before both are thrown out form throwing and breaking glasses.

   Given that She has absolutely no communication save the hand signals of demanding drinks with anyone else, her relationship with Lutze, along with, as noted above, her eventual sharing her own clothing, a bath, and even her bed is puzzling and fascinating both. Obviously Ottinger is hinting at a kind of lesbian relationship   that persists even between drunkards, reinforced by the woman’s later visit to a lesbian bar and her immediate friendship with performer Nina Hagen. But just as often the loyal Lutze wanders off, at one point with a man, and She seems to momentarily forget about her friend’s existence. Moreover, nothing quite explains the wealthy woman’s attraction to a figure completely removed from her status as a woman of exquisite beauty, of classical dignity and harmonious Raphaelesque proportions, a woman, created like no other to be Medea, Madonna, Beatrice, Iphigenia, Aspasia, although some of those figures themselves represent direct opposites.      

     But it is that relationship, more than anything other than her endless desire for alcohol that most fully defines the enigmatic beauty. And while She says almost nothing, Lutze is constantly giggling, gurgling, and talking, although not often very coherently.

      What the critics who I have read seem to have forgotten is one of Ottinger’s last phrases of her introductory commentary about her nameless Drinker: “Her resolve to live out a narcissistic, pessimistic cult of solitude strengthened during her flight until it reached the level at which it could be lived.”

     Hansen’s description of the beautiful alcoholic as reminding us of the historical figure of the Dandy: “The Drinker like the Dandy, is at the same time artist and artifice, using her body as the surface of her art.” And certainly the inferred connection she makes with Oscar Wilde signifies even more in the context of the last of Ottinger’s “Berlin Trilogy” installments, Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press. But She is not merely a dandy, a stylish alcoholic out to do herself in like the numerous 1890 drinkers of absinthe, but is a female reincarnation of Narcissus.

    In this case Narcissus looks not simply into the waters around her, the only available mirror for the classic beauty, but into the drinks she shallows down that invoke her self-absorption. Throughout the film, Ottinger shows her figure peering into mirrors sometimes enjoying but just as often disappointed by what She sees there, beauty that can never itself be fully enjoyed, a vision of endless unfulfillment.

      As with the original Narcissus, She also has her own Echo in Lutze. If you recall your Ovid, Echo was an extremely talkative goddess admired for her voice and song, so talkative in fact that after she lied to Juno about her husband Jupiter, she was punished, rendered unable to say anything but repeat and complete others’ sentences. In love with the hunter Narcissus, she could not fully tell him of her love, but only mimic his sentences, forcing her eventually to rush into his arms, in response to which the appalled Narcissus, immediately rejected her. Alone and without love, Echo eventually wasted away, leaving only the remnants of her voice repeating those words of others.      

    Ottinger does not present Lutze as a literal Echo. She does in fact form her own sentences, but most of them are simple utterances framed by the focus of her life, “Madam.” And her comments also often trail off into gibberish and laughter. Lutze does not rush into Madam arms, no is she entirely rejected, although ultimately this Narcissus becomes so engaged with herself that she utterly ignores her Echo, despite her attempts to help her up when she falls on the subways stairs into a kind of death that intensely reminds one of the subway death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends (1975) character Franz Bieberkopf, another kind of Narcissus.      

     Just as I argue for Franz, that it may all be simply a drug-induced nightmare since “little else has been real in [his] life,” so does the fallen woman of Ottinger’s film finally pull herself up as the morning crowds rush in and ends her life far more fittingly by cramming her well-swathed body into a small mirror-covered cubicle, the kind you might find in a carnival “hall of mirrors,” where we catch only brief glimpses of her as her stiletto heels punch into and crack the glass-covered floor upon which she proceeds into the complete embracement of her own being.

 

Los Angeles, November 26, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).