Rimini

Richie Bravo (Michael Thomas) is a sleazy schlager superstar in disgrace. If he was ever truly popular at all it’s hard to tell, he now only sings to old people in the tacky lounges and restaurants of mediocre hotels. Absurd and unsettling, Ulrich Seidl’s Rimini proposes a brilliant study of a decaying middle-age masculinity, where poor choices and poor taste mask profound crises.

Just as Rimini is cold and deserted, almost against its nature – a summer tourist resort in winter – Richie Bravo is also out of season. He gambles all the money he has left or spends it on drinks and he’s clinging to a fake persona and a nostalgic past. As do his lamentably loyal (mostly female) senior fans, so very enamoured with his Italian-language crooners. Dressed in glitzy costumes, he can barely still fit in and in front of sparkly backgrounds, Richie’s shows are a painfully awkward pretence that things haven’t changed, with everyone trying to relive an era gone by. Delusion is better than depression, perhaps. Yet through all the nauseously sentimental lyrics of his songs there transpires the pitiable desperation of a failed man. He’s vulgar, sometimes even racist, he takes advantage of his so-called fame to offer his fans sexual services in exchange for money, Seidl’s deadpan realism makes Richie so laughable that we cannot help, on some level, but to feel sorry for him.

The director offers perhaps the best visual representation of the word ‘kitsch’ cinema has recently seen, through the comically named Villa Bravo Richie sometimes rents to his fans. As some sort of shrine to himself, it’s filled with Richie Bravo memorabilia. The villa’s outrageous yet cheap looking decor is equally a witness to Richie’s trying to fill a void and need for a refuge. Refuge from what? We cannot guess. It may be himself or other saddening troubles he silently deals with, such as his father’s dementia. Sustained by Seidl’s cold, often still camera, and alternating between the resort and an old people’s home in Austria, where Richie’s father (Hans-Michael Rehberg) wanders the hallways, depressed, an atmosphere of disquietude looms over Rimini.

Aside from his personal shortcomings, or rather because of them, Richie’s also a failed father, as he discovers he has a daughter, Tessa (Tessa Göttlicher), who one day shows up in Rimini demanding financial compensation for all the years he’s been absent. If there is compassion to be found in this stark study of a pathetic man, it is through this complicated father-daughter relationship. In a sick turn of events, Richie seems to be willing to make amends, but since he’s a penniless drunkard his only choice remains that of further cheating his fans out of money. The immorality of it all triumphs as we understand how lonely and deluded – much like Richie himself – his fans are.

I will not necessarily invoke here Seidl’s consistent documentary work or that he employs a certain documentary-like style for Rimini, but Richie Bravo is so like many men I have met over the course of my life. The inappropriate, many-things-phobic uncle you treat with a mix of contempt and pity and that everyone seems to somehow still tolerate. Because it might be more prestigious or it might seem more sentimental, I have grown up in a culture where these sort of invented, fake Italian personalities have not been uncommon, and neither have these types of dedicated fans. If this sort of deranged relatability is misplaced I may find out, as Seidl also plans a companion piece for Rimini filmed exactly where I grew up, in Romania, called Sparta and following Richie’s equally questionable old man-child brother.

Ultimately, the film may not be overtly political, except for a presence of quiet, cold-stricken immigrants and refugees, which could be making a point about how we willingly refuse to see them. However, Rimini seems to incorporate a malaise that feels so profoundly European, sometimes cynically, sometimes compassionately, relating to how many of our senior citizens won’t budge from antiquated views and are willing to go down with them, still stuck in the past of their youth and unable to deal with the present.