03/27/2023
KPFK Film Club Review: RIMINI
Ulrich Seidl’s poignant and darkly humorous RIMINI is centered around an absolutely fascinating character. Richie Bravo is a barrel chested, goateed, ponytailed Austrian Don Juan/lounge singer, whose hunting grounds is an off-season, frostbitten, nearly vacant Italian resort. There’s a lot of lonely, middle-aged female German tourists that go through Rimini, and Richie is ready to woo them all with his romantic pop songs, Humperdinck schtick, and open collared suits with wide lapels. After the show, there’s also availability for adoring fans with a hotel room, a few bucks, and maybe a bottle of champagne on hand.
Actor Michael Thomas inhabits the gone-to-seed crooner with such suave, smarmy romantic verve that it’s easy to begrudgingly be fascinated by him, even while considering the man as well beyond redemption. Richie swaggers onto the stage as the king of Schlager music (sweet sentimental pop ballads, written authentically by Fritz Ostermayer und Herwig Zamernik). He fills the room with broad dramatic gestures and schmaltzy lyrics about love and longing, and the crowd is left cheering (especially when he fronts for a round of grappa.) The glow in his victim’s star struck eyes seems like the only warmth in his and their lives, especially in this run-down resort shrouded in chilly grey winter skies. Richie has been at this for a long time, and he knows the star role well, even if his show really only amounts to velvety voiced karaoke.
As for the private “after parties”, intimate s*x is unflinchingly filmed, without flattering the scenes in any way. Richie’s trysts are transactional, and only a brief respite from loneliness. However, just as with his singing, the emotion and caring for the women he beds seems convincingly sincere, at least in the moment—it’s all part of the dream that he’s selling. During the day, he swaggers around the wintry Rimini grounds in slacks, a wife be**er tee, and a heavy seal skin coat, ever the “Viking” on patrol.
The hulky, self-centered survivor may be mired in booze, poverty (he sometimes has to rent out his “Villa Bravo” to fans), and s*x for hire, but he lives his sleazy life robustly, with bravado. And he’s not all bad. When he travels to Austria to attend his mother’s funeral, he has affectionate drunken fun with Ewald (Georg Friedrich), his brother, and sings a tender a Capella ballad at the cemetery service. He makes a caring stop at the nursing home which provides for his miserable, dementia-addled father (Hans-Michael Rehberg), a man as likely to burst out with a N**i ballad from his time in the Hi**er youth, as he is likely to burst into tears. Afterwards, Richie heads back to his ostentatious but desolate home in Rimini.
The singer is portrayed as being passively bigoted, in an oblivious way. He tenderly sings a racist song to his Black housekeeper’s baby. As he walks by homeless immigrant men huddling along sidewalks in the cold, he seems to not even notice them.
All that changes when Tessa (Tessa Göttlicher), a hardened, angry blonde young woman, makes a sudden appearance at the resort. She insists that she is Richie’s abandoned daughter, and that he must pay up all the child support (30,000 euros) that he has neglected over the last 12 years. Her young Arab boyfriend lurks ominously nearby.
After getting over his initial shock, Richie, surprisingly, promises to somehow come up with the money. However, he wants to try to reconcile, forming some kind of relationship with Tessa in return. Her cold heart doesn’t appear anywhere near thawing, but she will stick around in the mobile home that she shares with her many immigrant friends until she gets the cash. Richie’s descent, to make that happen, is heartbreaking, impinging on his life in ways that he never imagined.
RIMINI is the first of two films that will conclude with the upcoming SPARTA, which shifts its focus onto Richie’s brother Ewald. It, too, is said to be based on the theme of a long-armed past that reaches into the present. On its own, RIMINI’s grim reality and pathos is offset by a truly magnificent performance by Michael Thomas that keeps you cheering for him, even as the world closes in around him. He learns, the hard way, that it’s not enough to sustain yourself by playing the starring role to fans, no matter how much they may adore you for it. Seidl seems to be reminding us that, if one is to survive this cold, lonely, and constantly changing life, much, much more is required than fairy tale romance.
RIMINI opened at The Quad in NYC on March 17, and opens at the Laemmle Royal in LA, March 31, with other cities to follow.
Get more info here: https://www.bigworldpictures.org/films/rimini/index.html
Enjoy the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/727781917
