The lonely existence of singer ‘Richie Bravo’, stumbling down the descending slope of whatever heyday lays in his past, is amusingly examined in Ulrich Seidl’s coyly titled Rimini. The Italian tourist mecca on the Adriatic coast has become for many a symbol of tawdry triteness and the airheaded beach life – but that’s the summer, and Rimini is shot in the cold and rainy wintertime. It’s the perfect setting for a sleazy story about human failing, told in Seidl’s very personal ironic idiom. The film is satisfying on many levels, including of course its inclusion of those outrageous sexual encounters that populate his work, yet more than in any previous film, it closes on a dramatic note of intense sadness and frustration. Bowing in Berlin competition, it will very likely be on the jury’s shortlist.
True to the director’s proclivity for making films in series, Rimini is planned as the first part of a diptych about two brothers who can’t escape their past; the second film, now being edited, is called Sparta and deals with Richie’s younger brother Ewald and his attempt to make a new life for himself in Romania.
Clearly this work was long in the making. Seidl has stated that he stopped production in late 2017 after transferring his actors and crew to Rimini, where they waited for the usual winter fog to roll in. It didn’t, and they adjourned to the following year when not only tons of fog appeared, taking DP Wolfgang Thaler’s lighting to another level of atmosphere, but it also snowed. Another event around the same time was the death of stage actor Hans-Michael Rehberg, who gives his final, stunning performance here as an elderly and infirm man living in a sterile nursing home. His intensity in the last scene pulls the story far away from the farcical humor and grotesquerie that have become Seidl’s trademarks, into a more dramatic area of the human comedy.
It also feels slower paced than some of the director’s offerings, perhaps because it depends so much on one character and the bad habits that govern his life, which naturally tend to repeat themselves. Tailor-made for actor Michael Thomas, who worked with Seidl on Import Export and played the training coach at the diet camp in Paradise: Hope, the role of Richie Bravo gives Thomas ample range to display the strong physicality of his acting. His swaggering male bravado and Las Vegas entertainer look – blond ponytail, sealskin coat, cowboy boots, jewelry, tattoos — contrasts with a less-than-secure and in-control personality. We meet him in the nightmarishly perfect nursing home, where Richie and his brother Ewald (Georg Friedrich of Great Freedom) get their doddering father (Rehberg) ready for a rare excursion outside. The occasion is their mother’s funeral. Dad is too far gone with dementia to understand what is happening, and neither son makes any effort to get into his psyche.
Location switches are generally ambiguous, but the next train stop for Richie is clearly marked Rimini, and this is where the fun begins. Strutting into one of the town’s new four-star hotels, which has bagged a German-speaking package tour despite the season and foul weather, he gallantly kisses the hands of the ladies, who are all well over 60 and mostly unaccompanied. He gushes more charm and up-close mooning when he belts out sentimental songs in German, a.k.a. Schlager music. Thomas channels these simple, direct tunes about love and loss (impeccably imitated by composers Fritz Ostermayer and Herwig Zamernik) so well he is able to pick up cash on the side when he visits some of his fans at night in their hotel rooms. His trysts with fishnet-clad Annie (Claudia Martini) hit that familiar non-p.c. spot between dismaying cheapness and comic delight (her ancient mother is in the next room). The explicitness of the scenes and language, the age of the lovers and the transactional nature of the encounter are exponentially multiplied in a later scene when Richie brings Annie and Emmi (Inge Maux, one of the lustier tourists in Paradise: Love) to an empty hotel to play hide and seek, while all three are totally wasted.
But the heart of the story is about family relationships, and Seidl and Veronika Franz’s screenplay gets back on topic with the arrival of his 18-year-old daughter Tessa (Tessa Goettlicher), who he hasn’t seen for twelve years and doesn’t recognize. The girl, who is accompanied by a silent Arab boy with a big black beard, stirs lonely Richie’s paternal instincts, although she’s after something very different. Though well-played by the tough-as-nails Goettlicher, a woman who is finally a match for her devious father, there’s something rhetorical about the character and the effect she has on Richie’s life that feels out of step with the atmosphere of Rimini and weakens the ending.
Apart from the frequent musical interludes when Richie grabs the mike, which are mercifully cut brief in Mona Willi’s decisive editing, it is the splendid cinematography that gives the film its tone. Using head-on, fixed frame shots a lot, Seidl regular Wolfgang Thaler creates one inspiring tableau after another. Several truly beautiful compositions have warm and glowing Edward Hopper-style interiors emerging from the cold night outside. In other shots, a thick fog eats away at the stormy sea and long empty beaches, where patches of dark-clothed migrants who huddle in the cold, ignored by everyone, take us back to the ending of Seidl’s horrifying Safari and the hungry African laborers gnawing the bones of trophy animals.
Director: Ulrich Seidl
Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz
Cast: Michael Thomas, Tessa Göttlicher, Hans-Michael Rehberg, Inge Maux, Claudia Martini, Georg Friedrich
Producers: Philippe Bober, Michel Merkt, Ulrich Seidl
Cinematography: Wolfgang Thaler
Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin
Costume design: Tanja Hausner
Editing: Mona Willi
Music: Fritz Ostermayer, Herwig Zamernik
Sound: Klaus Kellermann
Production companies: Ulrich Seidl Filmproducktion, Essential Filmproduktion, Parisienne de Production, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Arte France Cinéma
World sales: Coproduction Office
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (competition)
In German, Italian
114 minutes
