The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 15-21
Ticket of No Return (1979)
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger
A mysterious female arrives in Berlin on a one-way ticket with the intention of merrily drinking herself to death. Our perpetually brightly dressed heroine (played by Tabea Blumenschein, who also designed the film’s costumes) soon picks up with a dumpy, fawning, pushcart-bearing older woman (played by Lutze) who devotedly vows to aid the lady in her quest. Three prurient gray-toned female commentators consistently hover nearby and comment on the consequences of vice as our leads stagger through deteriorated streets at night encountering a dwarf, a transvestite, a lonesome hotel clerk, and other Berliners who might under different circumstances appear abnormal, but in the cockeyed and economically broken-down world on display seem to immediately fit right in. Ticket of No Return is the first entry in what the German director Ottinger (born in 1942) has fashioned as a Berlin trilogy. Like the subsequent Freak Orlando and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press, it shows a once-ruined city being filled up with life thanks to the presence of myriad cheerfully motley folks bound together in solidarity and in self-destruction. Aaron Cutler (June 18, 7:30pm; June 30, 5pm at the Spectacle)
