Name: Ticket of No Return
Director: Ulrike Ottinger
Released: 1979
Duration: 109 min

An enigmatic woman with no name books herself a one-way trip in order to drink her way through West Berlin in Ulrike Ottinger’s most revered film.

Dressed to the neuns, Tabea Blumenschein (known only here as “she”) arrives at Tegel Airport with one thing on her mind: alcohol. Setting off on a curious odyssey through Berlin’s bourgeois and bohemian drinking establishments, she invites a woman of very different means (Christine Lutze) to join her for a cognac or 10, and together they rub shoulders – at an aloof distance – with the city’s outré inhabitants (played by an eclectic cast including Nina Hagen, Eddie Constantine and Martin Kippenberger). Intent on her own oblivion, she pays no attention to the Greek chorus following her all the while: three sociologists in houndstooth suits whose conversation revolves around moral judgements and facts about gendered alcoholism.

Director Joanna Hogg (The Eternal Daughter, MIFF 2023; The Souvenir, MIFF 2019) has said that this film had a “decisive influence” on her desire to become a filmmaker, having seen it at age 19 and likening it to her love of the work of both Derek Jarman and Powell and Pressburger. Frequent Ottinger collaborator Blumenschein (star of Madame X: An Absolute Ruler and co-director of The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors) is dazzling in this “portrait of a drinker” (as the original German title translates to), bringing a doomed charisma to a mostly wordless performance. She also designed the glamorously clamorous costumes, and appears briefly in drag.

“Extravagantly stylized … There’s a crucially feminist tone and import … Ottinger’s leaps of absurdity express the tangle of confusion into which women are driven and their pent-up defiance of a repressively rational order – a venting of smiling rage at the idea that anyone should find women’s emancipation, or, simply, equality, anything other than self-evident.” – The New Yorker