Shabby with sarcasm and hits: the movie “Rimini” can only come from Austria

A man sings about his best friend. And he is none other than Winnetou. Together they want to build bridges, “we two, me and you, Winnetou”.

Anyone want to jump into the 2022 summer drop debate with this scene? no Austria’s great depression director Ulrich Seidl made it early 2018. In Rimini. In winter in Rimini. Just the word Rimini sounds like a hit. And a little after Ballermann. Mass tourism in party mode. 15 kilometers of beach, sunscreen and enough guests to fill 1200 hotels.

In his feature film «Rimini», Ulrich Seidl chose the other side of the oldest seaside resort on the Adriatic: for the low season, when only a few Austrian and German widows populate the city. And Richie Bravo (Michael Thomas), the man who not only sings about Winnetou, but above all that feeling called love. And the desire. And the wanderlust that drove everyone to Rimini.

Richie’s hits touch the hearts of the lonely women. In addition, he is a successful widow comforter, a callboy for his aging groupies, and his clients’ lingerie selection is amazing. And if that wasn’t enough, he rents out his house to fans with the life-size Richie Bravo posters and the few glittering knick-knacks he still has from the past, and lives in a closed hotel.

Meanwhile, Richie’s father lives in a nursing home in Austria. Undaunted, he practiced the Hitler salute and wallowed in Schubert’s “Winterreise”. He decorated his room with the antlers of people who shot themselves. There are funny photo wallpapers on the walls and doors. When Richie runs out of money, he tries to steal from his father.

Welcome to total sadness. Where the bodies are withered, the jokes are bad and the neon lights are freezing cold and Richie performs at establishments with names like 007 Dancing. So welcome to an Austrian film, for no one can portray the hideous poverty of the bungled as lustfully and with shame as Austria. Whether it is Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Wolf Haas or Ulrich Seidl, who makes films about the chasms that man himself is digging.

The people in «Rimini» are so needy, but also cunning, that it is both very tragic and very comical to see them struggling for life. There are perversions, surprises and redemptions, all set against the spectacularly sad backdrop of the misty, then snowy coastal city.

Michael Thomas as Richie Bravo is like a half-decayed mammoth as he guiltily trudges through the snowy sand, on stage and in bed scraping together a few vestiges of his former greatness – and it works.

Hans-Michael Rehberg (he plays Richie’s father) spent the last days of his life on Seidl’s shoot. He wanted the part of someone who dies incorrigibly so badly that after an initial refusal he asked Seidl to audition again. Everyone knew it would be his last performance. He performed a miracle in front of the camera. Then he died. Richie and his wives (including Inge Maux, who played Motti’s mother in “Wolkenbruch”) are crazy, grotesque, entertaining, melancholic. Richie’s father, whose face Rehberg’s knowledge of impending death is written every second, is a huge shock.

Hits in “Rimini” are not only the crème de la crème, which makes the often bone-dry Gugelhopf of today more tolerable. You can learn from hits. In any case, Richie Bravo recognizes his daughter’s Syrian friend in the strange men “with brown eyes and black hair” that Udo Jürgens sings about in “Greek Wine”. A bridge is being built there. Like Winnetou.

“Rimini” hits theaters October 6. «Sparta» has no start date yet.​