Modern Classic: Rimini (Ulrich Seidl, 2022)

Rimini is perhaps the most accessible film that Ulrich Seidl has ever made. But even though I highly recommend it, it’s still not for the faint of heart.

I say ‘perhaps’ because ever since the very good but also very depressing Hundstage (2001) I’ve avoided movies by the Austrian misanthrope like the plague.

As much as I admired his German counterpart Michael Haneke - also dark but influenced by Hitchcock in a way that made his movies much more accessible - I decided that Seidl’s movies just weren’t for me. Until I read the logline for Rimini and was immediately sold on it.

It’s about a once famous but now totally washed up lounge singer called Richie Bravo (Michael Thomas), who looks a bit like Mickey Rourke and who tries to keep afloat in wintry Rimini (on Italy’s Adriatic coast) singing in hotels for elderly tourists in the off-season, until his grown-up daughter Tessa (Tessa Göttlicher) shows up to confront him with his past.

I love father-daughter stories, I love stories that involve (a lot of) music and I love desolate seaside towns in winter time. So that’s Seidl going 3-0 up before the movie even started.

And yes, the rest of the movie completely holds up, too, even though Seidl still doesn’t make it easy on the viewer. For a start, he doesn’t really believe in sympathetic characters. If movies really are an ‘empathy machine’ as Roger Ebert once famously wrote, I guess nobody ever told Seidl, or (even more likely) he just wiped his ass with it.

At the beginning of the movie Richie briefly leaves his villa to reunite with his brother Ewald (George Fruedrich). They have to bury their recently departed mother and take care of their ailing father (played by Hans-Michael Rehberg, who actually died shortly after filming his scenes).

It’s clear that father is in the process of losing his marbles, which would be sad, if it weren’t for the fact that he is one of those old Nazis who still likes to perform the Hitler salute (which is currently popular in MAGA circles).

Richie isn’t like his father, but over the years of fame and fortune he has become one of those selfish bastards who can’t begin to fathom that he is basically the stereotype for toxic masculinity, walking out on his mother after their daughter was born and never even bothering to pay child support through all these years. So money is what Tessa and her boyfriend come to collect when Richie starts performing a new series of shows in Rimini.

You would think that Tessa would be the most sympathetic character in the movie, but there is something equally ruthless in the way she approaches her father like a pin machine. Richie, for his sins, does want to make up with her, but it’s clear that Tessa sees the relationship as purely transactional.

Fortunately, Richie has a side hustle, which provides him with an opportunity for blackmail, but this is also where the movie gets a little bit icky. Cause Richie isn’t just a singer with a lot of elderly female fans, he is also a gigolo to some of those fans, getting paid handsomely for his services. And Seidl delights in showing us these services, perhaps a few too many times, because we got it the first couple of times.

But even if you’re not interested in the paid sex life of the elderly and infirm, the rest of the movie is so engaging that it’s not really a dealbreaker. Seidl may not care much for sympathetic characters, but he does create, at least in this movie, very humane ones.

Also, his eye for composition is on a par with other European auteurs like the aforementioned Michael Haneke and Ari Kaurismaki, so that’s a big plus.

And the music, schmaltzy torch songs and schlagers, may not be to everybody’s liking, but they do add a lot of character to this remarkable movie.

Rimini is definitely not for everyone but I give it four stars!

Note 1: The character of Ewald has his own movie, Sparta (2022), which was shot at the same time as Rimini. Together the two movies are known as the ‘Bose Spiele’.

Note 2: Rimini is available through various streaming services like Prime Video and Google Play.