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.
Introduction, excerpt from the script
The movement of transformation in this film has the opposite trajectory as the previous film Madame X. There women come from very specific backgrounds to journey into the unknown, here a woman without a name comes from an unknown place and engages in a most specific sight-seeing tour of Berlin based on her interest in alcoholic beverages. In a sense this project also represents the exploration of the unknown, and death and destruction await her equally at the end of each journey, that to the extreme outer regions of adventure as well as that of total narcissistic retreat into the self.
Ulrike Ottinger