alcoholism

Ace in the Hole (1951)

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Within the first five minutes of Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas does one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen: hitting the carriage return button on a typewriter and while holding a match to the machine, igniting it so that he can light his cigarette. It’s also the last thing he does before we find out what kind of man he really is, and our respect for him is going to vary a lot over the next hour and a half. Douglas is Charles Tatum, a newspaperman extraordinaire, who’s worked in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and every other major news center in the U.S., and he’s lost his job in every one because he brings about libel suits, gets involved with the publisher’s wife, or gets caught drinking “out of season.” He tells all this to Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall), the editor, publisher, and owner of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, when he finds himself stranded in New Mexico. Boot, a man who is notably wearing both belt and suspenders, tells him that he’s also the town lawyer and edits every word before printing, that Mrs. Boot is a grandmother thrice over who would be flattered to be on the receiving end of Tatum’s attention, but that he won’t tolerate any liquor on the premises. Tatum sees this as an opportunity to start small and transition back to the big leagues, but after a year of dull news and a lack of anything exciting, he’s grown restless. 

He and the paper’s young photographer Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur) are sent on a trip to cover a rattlesnake hunt, but when they stop for gas in a place called Escudero, they find the station and its attached diner empty, save for a grieving older woman who does not greet or notice them. Realizing that there’s some ruckus going on behind the place at some nearby caverns, they start to drive up and come upon Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling), who tells them that her husband has been caught in a cave-in while exploring some “Indian” caves (the film never identifies the tribe other than a reference to the Minosa’s cafe selling Navajo blankets, and since Escudero doesn’t seem to be a real place, we don’t even have a region that would allow us to determine the tribe from a territory map). They drive up to the mouth of the cave and Tatum talks his way past the deputy and, given blankets and coffee by the buried man’s father, enters the cave, where he meets Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) and, turning on the charm, convinces the man to trust him. 

Intending to capitalize on the potential human-interest story, Tatum sets up shop in the Minosa’s motel/gas station/cafe and gets to work, taking the story of a veteran trapped in a cave-in and pairing that with the sensationalist story that he may have been the victim of vengeance from “Indian spirits” due to his treasure hunting in the appropriately ominously named “Mountain of the Seven Vultures.” When he discovers Lorraine preparing to leave the next morning with the eleven dollars she takes from the till and convinces her to stay, at first attempting to appeal to her wifely love for her husband and, when this tack doesn’t work, promises that she’ll find herself rich enough to take off with a lot more than eleven dollars if she sticks around and plays along. Tatum manipulates all involved, as he charms the sheriff (Ray Teal) as well, promising him re-election as he will play the part of the local hero coordinating activities; the sheriff, in turn, manipulates the engineer in charge of getting the man out to switch from his initial plan of putting in supporting struts to secure the passageway and getting Leo out in about a day to a more involved, visually striking plan to drill down through the mountain to get him out, which will stretch the operations out to five to seven days. The whole thing turns into a media circus — literally at one point, as the number of people drawn in by the spectacle starts to enter quadruple digits and the carnival is brought in. As Tatum becomes more energized and starts getting calls from the big city papers again, he continues to gamble with Leo’s life (hence the title) as he tries to get back on top. 

This is a whip smart movie with fast, witty dialogue, so sharp that it could shave your chin. Douglas is phenomenal, bigger than life, so much louder and more boisterous than everyone around him that you can see clearly that it’s not just his ability to read people and offer them exactly what they want; it’s his pure charisma and the way that he takes up all the air in the room. Sterling’s performance, however, is the standout to me. You’d think it would be impossible to make us like a woman who’s willing to use her husband’s physical entrapment as an excuse to escape, but she so effectively captures the boredom and tiredness of being trapped in a desert nowhere. When Tatum invokes her need to repay her husband for marrying her and giving her a life, she tells that him that she was fooled by his promise that he owned sixty acres and “a big business,” with the acres amounting to useless sand and the business being a place where she “sell[s] eight hamburgers a week and a case of soda pop” while Leo continues to treasure hunt in a clearly unsafe cave. She’s been repaying him for five years, she says, and she’s ready to get out; she’s vain and apathetic about her husband’s situation, but she’s also got a point. 

She’s among the few people who can give Tatum a run for his money in the sass department, including an early defining character moment when he asks if they can put him up for the night and she responds with “Sixty beautiful rooms at the Escudero Ritz. Which will it be, ocean view or mountain view?” Tatum’s editor Boot can also go toe-to-toe with him on occasion, as evidenced by him pulling a nickel out of his pocket and handing it over to Tatum when they first meet and Tatum negs the Sun-Bulletin by way of leading up to the offering of his services. Perhaps most fun, however, is the one-scene appearance of Richard Gaines as Nagel, a fiery, tempestuous New York editor who makes J.K. Simmons’s J. Jonah Jameson look like a bored Brian Williams. The people who can’t compete with him generally fall under his spell. The sheriff, for his part, is utterly guileless in his corruption and ability to be manipulated and goes so far as to have “Re-Elect Gus Krentz for Sheriff” painted on the side of the mountain one night, which is so comically odious that you almost have to respect him. He’s not as smooth or as clever as Lorraine, but he is devious, and willing to twist any arm that he can get his hands on, if it puts a penny in his pocket. 

The thing about gambling is that you can only ride a lucky deal for so long, and if you keep on going and keep on pushing, your luck will eventually run out. Tatum’s right about the cynical nature of the public—eighty-four people trapped in a mine is not as newsworthy as one man—but he’s also haunted by the same flaws that cast him out of the metropoles and into the desert in the first place, including his insistence that he doesn’t “make things happen, [he only] write[s] about them.” By the time he starts drinking again, he’s already lost his way completely, not that he was ever the most respectable member of the fourth estate. It’s not merely enough that he’s coercing reality into a narrative that he can sell, it’s that he’s also pushing the limit of Leo’s endurance, as he starts to develop pneumonia due to being unable to move for days, and he’s corrupting sweet Herbie all the while. 

There’s really only one way this could all end, but I won’t give it away, as this is one that should be experienced in its entirety. And if you know the Hays Code, you know that everyone here has to be punished for their sins, although how that plays out is still a fantastic watch, and this has become my new favorite Douglas performance. The film is marred by some casual racism; the widespread use of the blanket term “Indian” is definitely a product of a different time, and it’s worsened by Tatum’s treatment of a Native American employee of the Sun-Bulletin, whom he first greets with “How” and later calls “Geronimo.” Still, there’s a reason that this one was rediscovered after many years being treated as a failure. Openly critical of both the police and media, it was an embarrassment to the studio, only becoming more widely known since its 2007 Criterion release. It’s not perfect, but it is great. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Exiles (1961)

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Every movie is documentary.  Whether or not the scene-to-scene narrative of a picture is a record of True Events (manipulated, as they all are, by the filmmakers’ selective curation), the picture itself is a record, a document of the past.  This becomes more apparent the older the picture has aged, as its performers, locations, and cultural context are cyclically replaced in the real world but remain intact onscreen.  That’s why it’s best not to get too hung up on genre boundaries when watching a picture like 1961’s The Exiles, which is presented as a documentary but is obviously driven by a semi-scripted narrative.  Documenting one drunken night in the lives of the Indigenous rock n roll greasers of 1950s Los Angeles, it’s a record of a time, a place, a people, and a moment in pop culture that have since been replaced and would otherwise be forgotten.  Which elements of the film qualify as documentary by definition of artistic medium are up for interpretation, but over time that distinction has mattered less & less.

Personally, I mostly receive the films’ clothes, locations, and voiceover narration as purely documentary in the genre sense.  Everything else onscreen plays as a recognition of and participation in the inherent artifice of cinema.  I believe the performers in the film are actual residents of the since-gentrified-into-oblivion neighborhood of Bunker Hill where they’re shown drinking, dancing, shouting, fighting, and just generally cutting up.  They appear to typify a genuine subculture of Indigenous youth who left the rural isolation of their government-assigned reservations to live out a hedonistic rock ‘n roll fantasy lifestyle in the big city, passing around the same little scraps of money amongst themselves for shared swigs of booze.  Their voiceover confessions about the never-ending cycle of getting drunk every single night with no particular plan or purpose feel bleakly sincere, while the onscreen illustration of that hedonism often feels more like reenactment in pantomime.  It has a very similar approach to narrative as its recent docufiction successor Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, except it’s shot as if it were a high-style Poverty Row noir.

The Exiles is factual but not exactly educational.  Its aimless, loosely scripted drunkenness might read as a kind of road-to-ruin moral lesson about alcoholism, but there’s no clear momentum or consequence to drive that point home.  Mostly, it’s just a slice-of-life document of one very specific community living out the Boomer rock ‘n roller fantasy of American Graffiti in real time, which to the sober eye can appear fashionably cool or hideously grotesque depending on the momentary vibes of the nonstop party.  I most appreciated it as a low-budget D.I.Y. project that couldn’t afford luxuries like color film or on-set sync sound recordings but still had a keen eye for aesthetic & cultural detail, most strikingly in scenes where the Native American stereotypes of the Westerns playing on background TV & movie screens clashed with the matter-of-fact representation of the real-life youth centered here.  At the same time, the way British filmmaker Kent Mackenzie opens the picture with historical photographs of Indigenous elders and never thinks to include mention of any specific tribe or nation now feels just as dusty as those Westerns did then.  It’s very much a picture of its time, as all pictures are.

Confession: I periodically fell asleep during a recent theatrical screening of this film, and I had to rewatch the final 20 minutes at home to piece together what I had missed during a few long blinks.  I’m not proud of this response to such a unique work.  I’m only mentioning it to note that as cool as the cultural documentation & vintage rock ‘n roll aesthetics are, the presentation can be a little dry.  I would usually apologize to anyone else who happened to be in that theater in case I snored during those mid-film disco naps, but I feel like after that guy got arrested for jacking it & nodding off during Love Lies Bleeding, the bar has been lowered enough for me to get away with it; at least I didn’t wake up with my peener out.  There are ways in which The Exiles‘s hands-off aimlessness decreases its value as filmic entertainment, but that approach is also exactly what makes it useful as an archival document, so I’m noting its patience-testing dryness less as a complaint than as an honest acknowledgement.

-Brandon Ledet

The Royal Hotel (2023)

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I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the barebones, few-frills thriller The Royal Hotel is my favorite film of the year so far, given that I bought in early on director Kitty Green (Casting JonBenet) & actor Julia Garner (Electrick Children) back when stock prices were low.  Still, it clicked with me as both collaborators’ finest work to date, following their much more muted workplace chiller The Assistant in 2020.  The Royal Hotel explodes The Assistant‘s post-#MeToo themes of misogynist microaggressions & mundane labor exploitations into a much more immediate, visceral chokehold thriller – channeling 1990s psych thrillers like Dead Calm instead of the low-hum, methodical terror of Jeanne Dielman.  If it were even slightly dumber or trashier, it could pull off a sensationalist title like You In Danger, Girl: The Movie or The Male Gaze: A Horror Story, while The Assistant was much more careful to not be boxed in by expectations of genre.  It’s wildly entertaining as a result, while never losing sight of the political target in its crosshairs (a tactic also adopted by this year’s fellow sun-drenched indie drama How to Blow Up a Pipeline).

Garner costars besides Jessica Henwick as a pair of American tourists who find themselves flat broke while backpacking in Australia.  In an act of financial desperation (or, depending on the character, an act of self-immolation), the 20-somethings take a government-assigned temp job working as barmaids in the Australian Outback, serving beers to the roughneck workers of a remote mining town.  From there, the plot plays out like a slightly more grounded version of Alex Garland’s Men, with each of the blackout drunk brutes on the other side of the bar attempting slightly different angles on manufacturing sexual consent from the “fresh meat” working the register, whether with charm or with the threat of violence.  Like in Men, the customers are all essentially the same threat disguised in slightly different presentations, except this time they swarm their victims like George Romero zombie hordes, overwhelming the humble little pub in waves of drunken chaos.  The women are constantly told to smile & “take a joke” while struggling to interpret the thin line between flirting and bullying, like the difference between an Australian calling you “a cunt” vs. an Australian calling you “a sour cunt.”  Meanwhile, every social signal from every direction is telling them to get so drunk they don’t care what happens to them, since they’re powerless to stop it anyway – whether as self-protection or as willful self-destruction, depending on who’s drinking.

The premise of two outsider tourists being shipped off to an isolated mining-town bar specifically to serve as eye-candy for the sexually frustrated workers sounds like a screenplay contrivance looking to justify a metaphor, but Green & co-writer Oscar Redding were inspired to write The Royal Hotel by real life events, relying on the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie as shockingly direct source material.  The young tourists profiled in Hotel Coolgardie may be Finnish instead of American, but their stories are followed closely in The Royal Hotel to the point of exact images & phrases of dialogue being photocopied in direct adaptation.  Hotel Coolgardie is just as horrifying as Green’s movie, except it’s shot & presented more like a TLC reality show than a psychological thriller, which almost makes the women’s story more unnerving.  In either case, the premise makes for wickedly effective Service Industry Horror that’s deeply relatable to anyone who’s ever worked a chaotic front-of-house job with rowdy, drunken customers, the same way The Assistant is relatable to anyone who’s ever worked a soul-draining office job for an evil corporate overlord (speaking as someone who’s done both).  They’re not just single-use metaphors about the horrors of “male attention” (a phrase used in both the doc and the narrative feature), since the generalized exploitations of modern labor and the women’s personal levels of desire to survive the ordeal complicate the central theme at every turn.

The Royal Hotel is a great film about misogyny, labor, social pressure, and alcoholic stupor.  And that’s not even getting into the racist power imbalance between the mostly white miners and the Indigenous workers who make up most of the service class (give or take a couple misplaced tourists).  Its Australian-set psych thriller credentials are cemented both by the appearances of a majestic kangaroo and the appearance of a menacing Hugo Weaving, near unrecognizable behind thick layers of sunburn and beard hairs.  It feels more immediate than nostalgic, though, distinctly a movie of its time.  Conceptually, it’s presented as Kitty Green’s simplest, most widely accessible work to date, but the nuances beyond its surface tensions & metaphors get remarkably complex the second you start to scratch at them – which is exactly what makes it her best.

-Brandon Ledet

Dasara (2023)

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As I mentioned when reviewing the Kollywood bank heist thriller Thunivu, my selection of newly released Indian action blockbusters has been severely limited in recent months, as I don’t currently have access to a car.  The only theater that screens the gloriously over-the-top action cinema I’ve taken for granted in recent years is all the way out in the suburbs, far beyond a reasonable bus ride, so I have to settle for whatever titles trickle down from its distant marquees to the streaming services I pay for at home.  Between Thunivu and the new Tollywood action-romance epic Dasara, Netflix has been the quickest to deliver the goods so far this year – give or take Pathaan, which I was lucky to catch on the big screen before it populated on Amazon Prime.  In Dasara‘s case, Netflix even premiered the film in its original language of Telugu, which isn’t always a guarantee for home viewing (even in big-name cases like S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali & RRR, which are still primarily presented in their Hindi dubs on the same platform).  As much as I appreciate Dasara making its way to my living room so quickly, though, I know in my stupid little heart that I would have enjoyed it much more had I caught it at the suburban multiplex.  The immense spectacles & body-rattling sound mixes of these movies demand the theatrical experience.  That environment makes a throwaway romcom like Radhe Shyam play like an action-hero riff on Cameron’s Titanic, crushing you so flat beneath its towering CG mayhem that you hardly have time to notice that the flirty jokes between its action sequences aren’t especially cute or funny.  For its part, Dasara also delivers the goods when it comes to large-scale CG action spectacle, but that can only carry you so far at home, so the lengthy lulls between its explosions tend to spoil the mood.  I’ve greatly enjoyed a few masala films I happened to see at home for the first time instead of the theater—Master, Karnan, Enthiran, the aforementioned Baahubali, to name a few—but they all would have been even more enjoyable & memorable had I seen them big & loud, which is an unignorable problem in more middling titles like Dasara.

Dasara details a lifelong friendship & romantic rivalry between a pair of mining-town besties.  After a youth wasted stealing coal off mining trains for liquor money and pining after the same childhood friend, the two ambitionless hedonists are forced to get serious about the politicians who poison their village – both through alcohol sales and through coal-mining air pollution.  The alcohol is treated as the bigger threat to local morale, in that it makes wastoid addicts out of every able-bodied man in their community (an anti-vice sentiment underlined by the opening credits’ health hazard warnings and a barn-burner monologue in the final scene).  Booze is also the main driver of local politics, as the powerful positions of bar owner & cashier are essentially treated as public offices, violently contested through rigged elections.  In establishing all of this big-picture conflict within the mining community, Dasara only leaves room for three major action sequences: a daring coal-train robbery, a vicious massacre of local drunks via machete militia, and a climactic act of revenge in which the evilest politician of all is decapitated via flaming machete after his goons are slaughtered one at a time.  There are some incredible moments & images in those sequences that highlight how India’s various film industries are regularly producing the greatest action movies on the market today, if not the greatest since Hong Kong action’s independent heyday in the 80s & 90s.  There is a lot of downtime between those moments, though, especially for a film with so thin of a moralist lesson (alcohol = bad) and with such cliché love-triangle tension.  A few weddings, cricket matches, and religious festivals liven up the dead space between the action payoffs, but not enough to make the picture especially worth seeking out at home.  Even when enjoying how its all-out explosive climax filled my TV screen with a wall of flames, all I could think about is how much cooler those flames would look if they were 30 feet taller and came with a bucket of popcorn.

Even though Dasara is a mixed bag overall, it’s really just one catchy composer short of being a stunner.  It’s got plenty explosive imagery, but its songs are mostly duds, so the time drags heavily between fires & beheadings.  To its credit, I was happy to see the musical numbers directly integrated into the narrative, when so many modern films in this genre separate them out as music video asides.  Unfortunately, they do so by adopting a plodding stage-musical songwriting style that never fully meshes with the score’s rapid, relentless percussion with any coherence.  Music is certainly one of the genre’s primary joys, but I’m not even sure that a louder theatrical environment would’ve helped the songs hit all that harder, even with the spectacle of dancers kicking up black coal dust in frantic choreography.  However, I do suspect that the constant coal-mine blasts of fireballs & air pollution would’ve been so much more vivid at the multiplex that I wouldn’t have cared about the mediocre music they interrupt.  Speaking from past experience, three great action sequences is usually more than enough to make one of these cheap-o epics worthwhile in that environment, whether or not the music is memorable.  Without that boost in scale & volume, Dasara is unraveled by its own thinness, which it appears to be aware of itself by the second flashback montage of earlier, more exciting scenes.  The action is too sparse for its songs to be this bland, and so the movie was only worth seeking out for the one week it screened at AMC Elmwood (or your local equivalent), when its few explosions would’ve stunned you for the longest stretches.  I don’t regret watching it at home, though, and I don’t think this experience will deter me from seeking out other Indian action streamers in the future.  In the past, I may have positively reviewed so-so masala films like Shamshera & Radhe Shyam for the enjoyment of the theatrical experience rather than the actual quality of the product, but that’s how they were intended to be watched.  Catching up with Dasara on my couch is only the Great Value™ equivalent of the real deal, and it will have to do until I have a car again or until one of the three remaining theaters in the city catches up with how fun these crowd-pleasers can be.

-Brandon Ledet

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)

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There are plenty of 1970s women-on-the-verge psych thrillers out there where shit-heel men drive the women under their thumb to total madness.  And we’ve covered plenty of them here on this very website: A Woman Under the Influence, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, 3 Women, Images, Sisters, etc.  All those Driven Mad by the Patriarchy thrillers are varying shades of great, but few are as committed to their psychosexual terror or bloody revenge as The Witch Who Came from the Sea.  It’s the cheapest and least technically competent film of the bunch, struggling to convey a hallucinatory mental breakdown in its dive-bar drunken stupor.  Still, it’s incredibly potent, angry stuff, fearlessly staring down sexual terrors most movies would shy away from depicting and slicing into men’s flesh to avenge them.  The Witch Who Came from the Sea might not carry the same 70s auteur prestige as other examples of its genre, which tended to be helmed by names like Altman, De Palma, and Cassavetes.  It’s a true Misandrist Horror classic, though, compensating for its budgetary & stylistic limitations with an overriding sense of righteous anger.

Our heroine in distress is the alcoholic barmaiden Molly, who spends her days babysitting her adoring nephews on the beach and her nights serving well liquor for meager tips.  At least, that’s the part of her nights that she remembers.  Between Molly’s excessive booze guzzling and the half-remembered sexual assaults she suffered under her father as a child, there are large gaps of lost time woven into her nightly routine – often involving casual sex with strange men she meets at the bar.  And murder.  Molly has a spiraling habit of coaxing the beefcakiest men in her vicinity (often famous, square-jawed football players & television actors) into bed, where she initiates kinky sex and then mutilates their genitals with shaving razors.  It’s initially unclear whether Molly’s bisexual threeways & beachside mansion rendezvous are sinister wet dreams. However, once her nightly murder spree starts making national news, the audience gets some solid footing in establishing that her unraveling psyche has a physical bodycount.  Poor Molly never gets that same real-world footing, though.  She’s lost inside her own head, and it’s terrifying in there.

Molly doesn’t despise all men, at least not when she’s awake & lucid.  She thinks the world of her nephews Tadd & Tripoli—names she repeats to herself as an absent-minded mantra—and the closest thing she has to a healthy relationship in her life is a semi-open romance with her bar-owner employer.  She even speaks softly & fondly of the muscle brutes she murders in her drunken fugue state, championing their value as macho role models for, you guessed it, Tadd & Tripoli.  She also rhapsodically praises the memory of her abusive father, though, whom she sees as a heroic sea captain who was valiantly lost at sea, not a deranged drunk who sexually abused his own children.  Molly’s sweet, swooning musings about men—especially men that remind her of her father—do not jive at all with the dick-slicing violence that emerges when she lets her guard down.  This isn’t so much a rape revenge film as it is a violent character study of a woman who doesn’t have the vocabulary to express—even to herself—how men have traumatized her throughout her entire life.  So, that expression instead comes through as a very close shave, after ill-advised nightcaps & hookups.

The Witch Who Came from the Sea is just as tense & unnervingly bizarre as similar women-on-the-verge classics from the likes of Cassavetes & Altman; its aesthetic & production values just lean more towards tasteless genre payoffs than subtle psychedelic dilemmas.  The first sign we get that Molly is unwell is when she lustfully gawks at muscle men working out on the beach; her searing stares at the absurdly veiny bulges in their Speedos quickly turns hyperviolent, and she imagines their corpses hanging from the public gym equipment.  Her romantic remembrances of her piece-of-shit father conjure seafaring images of Sirens, mermaids, ancient tattoos, and once-in-a-life-time storms.  Her actual memories of his sexual assaults are scored by screeching seagulls and slurred grunts.  It’s all deeply strange in an unrestrained, sloppy-drunk fashion that calls into question how much tonal control director Matt Cimber was commanding behind the camera (with the help of a young, uncredited Dean Cundey as cinematographer).

No matter where you land on that question, Molly’s bottomless anger towards the manly men of the world cuts through the seaside fog like a scythe.  When she threatens to “break your bones then suck the marrow,” you better listen; otherwise, you’ll soon be ejaculating spurts of blood onto her hand-embroidered bellbottoms.  It’s that pointed, visceral anger that makes The Witch Who Came from the Sea stand out among similar women-on-the-verge thrillers of the 1970s, and my only disappointment is that Molly’s anger wasn’t enough to save her from the same tragic fate this archetype always suffers in the end.

-Brandon Ledet

Ticket of No Return (1979)

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When we recently discussed Jacques Tati’s PlayTime as a Movie of the Month selection, we fixated on the film’s iconic restaurant sequence, in which its sterile, icy façade is gradually broken down into a sweaty mess of drunken revelry. It was a pleasure, then, to discover a sloppy-drunk lesbian remix of PlayTime in Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return that seemingly adapts that one restaurant sequence into a feature-length narrative. Self-described as a “portrait of a drunkard”, Ticket of No Return follows an unnamed, mostly silent, seemingly wealthy woman as she deliberately drinks herself into oblivion in Berlin. She’s not as befuddled or as passive as Tati’s signature Monsieur Hulot character. Rather, she’s a self-destructive lush who stumbles through Berlin as a silently obnoxious tourist, determined to guzzle down cognac & cocktails by the gallon on every barstool in the city. The film also chooses an entirely different political target than Tati’s screed against the nearing homogenized monoculture of a tech-obsessed future, focusing instead on the ways in which publicly misbehaving women are socially treated as repulsive beasts, while men are afforded much more leeway in their own libertinism. Still, Ottinger extrapolates a lot of her narrative’s sweatiest, most debaucherous impulses from the drunken restaurant breakdown sequence in PlayTime, converting the best scene from a well-loved movie into its own self-contained world of degeneracy & despair.

One of the more curious dynamics of Ticket of No Return is the film’s balance between subtlety & on-the-nose political commentary. Ottinger directly inserts her own voice into the picture as a narrator in the opening scene, a lengthy introduction to the unnamed protagonist’s sole function as a self-destructive alcoholic. Without that preface, it might have taken a while for her behavior to seem out of the ordinary, as excessive alcohol consumption is so socially encouraged that it doesn’t initially register as being especially unhealthy. Ottinger even deploys a literal Greek chorus to state as much in-dialogue, casting three characters as Social Question, Common Sense, and Accurate Statistics – morally uptight women who only speak in plain facts relating to their absurdist namesakes. However, even with all this blatant commentary on our gendered societal relationship with alcoholism, the film somehow comes across as a cryptic, esoteric art piece that cannot be fully understood, at least not on a first watch. As our “sightseeing” boozer protagonist becomes increasingly plastered in her dizzied tour of Berlin, the film exponentially obscures its messaging & intent in an absurdist fashion. It’s simultaneously an on-the-surface political statement that discusses its gender theory & alcoholism themes in plain academic terms and an enigmatic gaze into a drunken abyss that’s just as mysterious as it is playfully meaningless. It’s a fascinating internal conflict that will likely confound & alienate some audiences just as much as it delights the cheeky art school lushes who find themselves on its wavelength.

There’s a listless repetition to Ticket of No Return that will test a lot of audiences’ patience. After the narrator announces that our unnamed protagonist has purchased a one-way ticket to Berlin with Leaving Las Vegas-style intent, there’s not much that changes from scene to scene. She simply stumbles from bar to bar, drinking gallons of booze and swatting away sexual advances from both men & women while reaching for bottles. Often, the biggest excitement in the film is what outrageous outfit she will wear next, as her high-couture wardrobe harshly clashes against the degenerate behavior of her drinking escapades. The movie can be very unaccommodating if you’re not onboard with the most exciting action onscreen being how an asymmetrical primary-color dress is accessorized with dramatic sunglasses, in which case this movie is very much not for you. After it settles into its boozy groove, all that’s left onscreen is a woman engaging in self-destructive behavior while modeling obnoxious, over-the-top fashion pieces. If you’re looking for more grandly staged commotion, Tati’s PlayTime is better suited to dazzle you in its extravagance. Personally, I was much more attracted to this drunken, feminist, low-stakes/high-fashion tale of a bumbling tourist in a strange, overwhelming city. I even found it to be the funnier film of the pair, in its own nihilistic way.

-Brandon Ledet