Joan of Arc of Mongolia

Thanks to subsidy from German TV, Ottinger has carved out a niche for herself as the foremost lesbian adventurist film-maker in Europe. This particular farrago imagines four disparate women meeting on the Trans-Siberian Express (where their repartee falls pitifully short of the Noël Coward tone it aspires to), and then finding themselves hijacked by a nomadic Mongolian princess and dragged through a tour of 'exotic' Mongolian culture that changes their lives. The assumptions about western and eastern cultures on which this rests are every bit as repulsive as they sound, and don't stand up to a moment's thought; but the really nauseating thing about the movie is its phony reverence for Mongolian traditions, seen as a matriarchal web of ethnic ceremonies and unfathomable secrets. Shameless.