Those who start reading here, perhaps attracted by the title “Rimini”, should be warned. The film really does take place in the city on the Adriatic coast, at least mostly. But it’s not about Italy, and even less about Italians. Two locals are allowed to say about three sentences, and there are also Syrian refugees who remain silent. “Rimini” is an internal affair of Austria.
If you believe the director and author Ulrich Seidl, there are Austrian package tourists of retirement age who like to go to Rimini in winter. Then the concrete castles with sea views are empty, thick fog lies over the city, and a soul-destroying wind whistles over the beach. But that doesn’t bother these travelers as long as someone sings “Amore” in the hotel bar. No Italians please, you wouldn’t understand them. But an Austrian with a Schlagerfuzzi past. Enter Richie Bravo.
Richie Bravo is no longer young, but younger than his audience. He was, as one would say not only in Austria, once a handsome man. Currently he feels better when wearing slimming belts. It is not entirely clear whether he was ever really successful, but alongside Udo Jürgens he also sings his own hits, some of which were even written especially for the film. Sometimes his singing sounds as if a dream of music were still glimmering in him. Most of the time, however, there is only the lowered enamel of an experienced swindler.
Michael Thomas, actor, singer, stuntman, once Austrian Vice State Champion in heavyweight boxing, plays this Richie. He’s a show. Ulrich Seidl wrote the role specifically for him – basically he even invented the man. Thomas appeared in Seidl’s film “Import Export” seventeen years ago. Basically in the same role, as Kaventsmann with boastfully invoked, but essentially shaky libido and personality. After the end of the shooting he sang Sinatra in the hotel bar. This is how the idea for “Rimini” came about.
Richie Bravo is also there when the women want sex
The women who let him wrap them up are a little shakier than Richie. He whispers into the microphone for them and visits them in their hotel rooms to have sex with them and collect money for it. A special breed of Austrians of retirement age apparently travels to Rimini in winter to live out those longings that pop music unleashes. But please not with Italians, why should they? Richie Bravo is there, he lives all year round in Rimini, in a rather spacious villa.
Whether one believes in the existence of this business model, in Rimini of all places, is not so decisive for the film. Ulrich Seidl uses the sound of the place name as a code for better times – like his own summer holidays as a child, which once led him to Rimini. Perhaps he was also fascinated by the special desolation that the once legendary beach radiates today when it is so cold and deserted and wintry. You can bet that Seidl found the absolutely desolate corners for his film.
In this way, Rimini looks just as lost as cold Austria, which Richie visits twice, on home leave. Which is ironic on the one hand and logical on the other. He fled from something, but he couldn’t escape the desolation. You can see that when he pushes his father, who is suffering from dementia, through the retirement home in a wheelchair while he sings a song from the Hitler Youth. Richie stubbornly sings his own song: “Amore Mio”.
Hans-Michael Rehberg plays this frail father who is no longer quite of this world. A performance that is as frightening as it is touching, one feels the awareness that this would be his last role – he died during the shooting. Georg Friedrich also appears next to him in the Austria scenes as Richie’s younger brother. This brother has his own story and his own film called “Sparta”, which until now has only been shown at festivals and has already made headlines.
Romanian child actors and their parents have Seidl and his team in the mirror accused of manipulating and emotionally overwhelming them while shooting “Sparta,” and they were left in the dark about an aspect of the film that deals with unrealized pedophilia. Seidl rejects these allegations, most recently in a major SZ interview. That doesn’t apply to “Rimini”, here only adult and experienced actors take partwho absolutely must know what they are doing.
The city is a code for better times. Everything is miserable now
Like all great swindlers in cinema, Richie has to face himself. In the end, his daughter (Tessa Göttlicher), just of age, but already very tough, takes care of that. She tracks him down and demands a large sum of money as compensation for denied alimony and never being there and general assholes. Richie cries, falls to his knees and looks rueful, but feels that this time he has to pay. Unfortunately, he is also addicted to gambling and terribly clammy. The way out, it seems to him, lies in a new mess.
All of this shouldn’t really work. How often has the pop world been shown as dishonest against a background of cold sadness? For how many times have you looked at the ugliness of cheap hotels with comforting angst? And how many thousandth Nazi father can be seen here who ruins his children’s lives? But then it works, especially because the film promises no salvation at all, and no insight either. Everything is as miserable as it is.
Rimini can also be very cold – scene from Ulrich Seidl’s film of the same name.
(Photo: Seidl Filmproduktion/Neue Visionen)
“Rimini” works particularly well thanks to the pictures taken by cameraman Wolfgang Thaler. He has been working together with Ulrich Seidl for a long time, and the two of them have always had a penchant for static, symmetrical image design. Over the years they have become more and more strict in their photography – now they film ugliness like an architectural prospectus, you won’t find any more falling lines in their pictures.
These careful compositions not only seem to hold the film, in the end they even banish the misery of the world. As long as the verticals in the pictures remain vertical with millimeter precision, the chaos and vale of tears can be endured if you look at them with mathematical principles, as if through the grid of eternity. This is, in a way that is difficult to explain, very reassuring.
Rimini, Austria, D, F 2022 – Director: Ulrich Seidl. Book: Veronika Franz, Seidl. Fritz Ostermayer, Herwig Zamernik. Camera: Wolfgang Thaler. With Michael Thomas, Hans-Michael Rehberg, Tessa Göttlicher. Rental: New Visions, 116 minutes. Theatrical release: October 6th, 2022.