Rimini Review: Ulrich Seidl’s Tragicomic Braiding of the Soul of a Man and Nation

The film fleshes out perhaps familiar characterizations by tying contemporary wounds to the persistent presence of Europe’s ugly history.

Rimini
Photo: Big World Pictures

The key moment in director Ulrich Seidl’s Rimini is when lounge singer Richie Bravo (Michael Thomas) wheels his elderly father (Hans-Michael Rehberg) through the corridors of the latter’s nursing home as both men attempt to sing over the other. Richie starts in with one of his cheesy ballads that he knows so well, and inspired, the confused old man begins creaking out a song that he knows by heart: Hans Baumann’s “Es zittern die morschen Knochen,” which was popular among Hitler Youth. One version of its refrain can be translated as “Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world shall.” In response to his father cycling through this fascist marching song, Richie just sings louder.

With Rimini, Seidl and co-screenwriter Veronika Franz tell a tragicomic story about a down-on-his-luck pop idol whose star may never have actually been all that bright. Its contours are familiar in many respects, though one thing you can count on from the beginning is that Seidl isn’t going to end the film on a Hollywood-style note of redemption or blaze-of-glory exit.

More than recounting a parable of decline and decrepitude, however, Rimini also pinpoints something rotten in the state of Europe. As the incisive scene in the nursing home suggests, the racist fantasies of German nationalism weren’t so much snuffed out as drowned out by the flashy decadence and simplistic sentiments of Austrian popular culture. (Richie and his family are Austrian, but of course his parents came of age in an era when people learned to see “German” as a racial and national identity that transcended political boundaries.)

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The film opens with Richie’s return to his provincial home in Lower Austria, where his mother has recently passed away. The bulky, lushly coiffed man reunites with his much slighter and more modestly styled brother, Ewald (Georg Friedrich), getting drunk and shooting bottles in the basement of their parents’ mostly empty home on the night before the funeral. At the service, the professional singer intones one of his trademark nostalgic ballads (written by Fritz Ostermayer and Herwig Zamernik), memorializing his mother with borrowed sentiment.

Throughout Rimini, Seidl strikes a somber but literally distanced tone, often letting extended portions of a scene play out in unbroken long shots. It invites us to observe the pathos of a man who presents himself with such extravagance amid the most nondescript settings. The film’s distanced visual style also brings the margins of Richie’s environment to our attention. As the man travels back from Nowheresville, Austria, to his home in the tourist destination of Rimini, Italy, it’s striking how little difference one detects between the landlocked, lifeless town that Richie hails from and the gray and empty coastal city that he lives in.

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The titular town suggests a European version of Atlantic City, and Richie might best be described as what would happen if Mickey Rourke’s character in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler took up singing and got stuck in a permanent “fat Elvis” phase. Amid glittering backdrops of cheap hotel conference room stages that seem to be the only sources of color in off-season Rimini, Richie performs his old hits to ever-diminishing crowds of vacationing retirees. Though he’s constantly hustling to stay afloat—one subplot sees him renting out his faux-palatial home to a couple enthused at the prospect of sleeping in Richie Bravo’s home—the man at least puts up the façade of being adjusted to this lifestyle.

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Sauntering around winter-time Rimini in a snakeskin duster, Richie spends his free time playing slot machines in a cramped local casino and seducing whichever Austrian tourists can still be blinded by his dubious star power. When a blond woman in dark sunglasses named Tessa (Tessa Göttlicher), about five decades younger than the average attendee, begins showing up at his performances and quietly observing him, it’s not difficult to guess what’s going on. But the filmmakers draw out the cringey dramatic irony, showing Richie unartfully hitting on the much younger woman before she reveals that she’s Tessa, his long-lost daughter, and that she’s come calling for two decades of overdue child support.

As Richie bargains with Tessa over the amount of her birthright and the timeline for delivering it, Thomas suggests someone who has remnants of a heart but who’s never learned how to be sincere. Decades of merely playing at having a romantic soul have occluded any ability he might have had to take others into his consideration. On a narrative level, the plot concerning Tessa’s reappearance has a kind of stock quality to it—proving oneself to a forgotten daughter was also the crux of The Wrestler—and can tend to drag. But Thomas’s slippery performance as a man who may or may not be totally empty inside proves consistently captivating.

Furthermore, the film fleshes out the perhaps familiar characterizations at its center by tying the contemporary wounds of Tessa and her father to the persistent presence of Europe’s ugly history. We return periodically to Richie’s father’s lonely existence in the nursing home, where, for reasons different from Richie’s intentional languishing in his yesteryear fame, the past and present have become indistinguishable. For the nonagenarian in extreme cognitive decline, the 1930s and the 2020s coexist. Rehberg, in his final performance, conveys the horror not just of what his generation did, but also what was done to them, the tragic and tragically resilient perversity of the nationalist mode of thought that was ingrained in them.

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Richie, too, was indoctrinated in some kind of perverse racial logic, as exemplified in the early scene when he sings a racist lullaby to the child of his Black housekeeper. Seidl’s long-shot exteriors also let us see how, preoccupied with his own problems—or rather, with maintaining his veneer of magnanimity and charisma—Richie brushes by the homeless men of color huddled along Rimini’s frozen sidewalks. In the end, Rimini is about a culture that’s been unable to learn any lessons from the scars of history. Seidl’s film bitingly recognizes that Richie Bravo’s form of easy postwar pop doesn’t so much give expression to anything of human substance as give both listener and crooner the license to ignore it.

Score: 
 Cast: Michael Thomas, Tessa Goettlicher, Hans-Michael Rehberg, Inge Maux, Claudia Martini, Georg Friedrich  Director: Ulrich Seidl  Screenwriter: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz  Distributor: Big World Pictures  Running Time: 114 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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