‘Rimini’: Berlin Review

Dir. Ulrich Seidl. Austria/France/Germany. 2022. 115 mins.  

Ulrich Seidl’s latest film is set in an out-of-season holiday resort – which is appropriate, as the Austrian writer-director’s speciality is the human soul out of season. A seasoned portrayer of abjection, but invariably with a comic twist and arguably a dash of cruelty, Seidl is in characteristic mode in Rimini. His return to fiction for the first time since his 2012-13 Paradise trilogy, following two documentaries, Rimini is very much a portrait film, centred on one larger than life character, a clapped-out cabaret crooner. Michael Thomas’ imposing performance will be the hook for a film that, while executed with Seidl’s typical steely control, might strike his followers as being a touch too familiar – while non-adepts will find its darker dimensions altogether too bleak for comfort.

What gives Rimini its unifying comic vigour and pathos is the central performance by Michael Thomas

Not that comfort was ever in Seidl’s palette. The film begins with a shot of senior citizens lined up in their chairs in an old people’s home – from which one resident with dementia is desperately trying to escape. The man, played by the late stage actor and director Hans-Michael Rehberg (Rimini is his last screen appearance, and is dedicated to him), is father to two adult sons – one of whom comes lumbering out of a rainy night to visit him. He is ‘Richie Bravo’ (Thomas), an ageing cabaret singer who seems once to have known success as an Austrian blend of Johnny Hallyday and Demis Roussos, but is now firmly on the skids. After stopping to join his brother in the family home, Richie sings a tender song at his mother’s funeral - his dad, of course, having no idea that his wife has died.

Then Richie returns to the Italian coastal resort of Rimini, which in winter seems permanently shrouded in deep mist, and where African migrants slump neglected and ignored on the pavements. Richie has a shrine to his former glory in his once swanky but unavoidably naff and now dilapidated home – a triumph of low-rent ’80s tack by the film’s design team. Very short of money – having blown his funds on booze and high living – Richie earns a modest income entertaining parties of elderly tourists and renting out his home as holiday digs, while himself bivouacking in a drab hotel closed for the winter. Richie also romances female admirers of a certain age – including Annie (Claudia Martini), who has had to bring her infirm mother along to the hotel. In fact, Richie is unashamedly putting his old-school gallantry and apparently serviceable priapic skills to level-headed use as a gigolo. However bad things get, the uncrushable Richie is always able to ride the storm – until a young woman named Tessa (Tessa Göttlicher) turns up to put the squeeze on him…

Rimini might appear to be a picture of a monster, and Richie is certainly grotesque (it’s surely no accident that Seidl has set his film in Fellini’s birthplace). He’s a swaggering narcissist with his vast wardrobe of outmoded Euro-dandy schmutters (top marks to costume designer Tanja Hausner for all the frockcoats, tight trousers and slightly threadbare gold fabrics), and he’s utterly hapless as he struggles to resist ruin. Yet we can’t help finding him sympathetic, as he lays (phoney or semi-sincere?) compliments on his bed partners, and plasters industrial-strength cheese over his stage patter.

However, just as we’re most willing to go along with him as a redeemable lost soul, dignified and even honourable, that’s when Seidl hits us with a dramatic turn that shows the character’s truly appalling side – what’s more, immediately after Richie and two women share a truth-telling session that’s altogether jaw-dropping.

Seidl has always specialised – both in his fictions and in his artfully stylised documentaries – in chipping away at the façades of Austrian society, and the humour here is in keeping with that, as witness Richie carolling, “Amore mio…” to cover his dad’s rendition of what appears to be a Nazi-era anthem to German might. Richie makes his own views clear on his first appearance by muttering at some passing Muslims, although he’s quick to insist that he’s not a racist. Tessa will put that claim to the test in an odd final-act development that confrontationally walks a delicate line in joking about race and otherness (although one is bound to be troubled by the film’s use of silent African migrants as, essentially, props in certain shots).

The film is executed with Seidl’s characteristic meticulousness, with DoP Wolfgang Thaler’s often exaggeratedly composed shots heavy with empty space and artificial symmetry; some images of the misty beach almost resemble abstract canvases. And yet, one feels that Seidl is somewhat retreading familiar territory, thematically and stylistically – and that this film doesn’t quite have the confrontational questioning edge of the Paradise films. And the final section, while providing a satisfyingly unlikely resolution, comes too late in an overstretched film not to feel as if it’s taking us off on a tangent.

What gives Rimini its unifying comic vigour and pathos is the central performance by Michael Thomas, who appeared in Paradise: Hope and, as a character considerably more appalling than Richie, in Seidl’s pitiless Import Export. Strutting along in his snakeskin boots and voluminous sealskin coat, but visibly shivering underneath from the real and figurative winter, he gives Richie a buffoonish swagger that recalls Ugo Tognazzi in his faded-rake period. What’s more, Thomas has the passable lungs to carry off Richie’s dog-eared repertoire of German-language, Italian-tinged ballads – one of which, the bizarre Western-themed ‘Winnetou’, is Thomas’ own plausibly kitsch-tinged composition.