Rating: NNNNN
JOHANNA D’ARC OF MONGOLIA (Ulrike Ottinger, 1989) is, like its title, tri-lingual, transcultural and more than a little disorienting. Delphine Seyrig plays an aristocratic traveller on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Joined onboard by a bourgeois tourist, a Broadway singer, a young hitchhiker and three very odd entertainers, she takes part in a series of hilarious, theatrical set pieces. Then, these seven women are kidnapped in Mongolia by a group of warrior women, and the real story begins. Filled with Ottinger’s trademark startling images and structured by her usual rigorous intelligence, this is a mix of farce, artifice and decentred ethnography that explores otherness on too many levels to mention. Not a lesbian fantasy in terms of patterns of desire, it nevertheless creates a complete, glorious women’s world. NNNN (December 7, Goethe Institut’s Kinowelt Hall)
