Berlin Review: Ulrich Seidl’s ‘Rimini’
12.02.2022 - 00:45
/ deadline.com
There’s bleak, there’s despairing, and then there is Ulrich Seidl, Austrian chronicler of the marginal, the miserable and plain mad. If there are Nazis still worshipping Hitler in some rural basement, Seidl will dig them out. Closet religious fanatics, marriages mired in cruelty, depraved things respectable people do on holiday that nobody at home will know about: Ulrich Seidl sets them out for all to see. Perhaps the Rimini director/co-writer is not so much bleak as relentlessly clear-eyed.
Rimini in winter, however — now there’s bleakness for you. A brash, crowded resort over the summer season, Rimini in winter seems to be perpetually lashed by sea storms or covered in deep snow. Even so, there are a few hotels still open for the budget bus tours that keep on coming. Those German pensioners might not be able to sit on the beach, but at least there is entertainment in the portly form of Ricky Bravo (Michael Thomas), a lounge singer who looks as if he has drunk several bars dry between sets.
Ricky has a good, if permanently sozzled, heart. We first see him reunited with his brother in Vienna on the eve of their mother’s funeral in a house full of animal trophies; they get drunk and shoot bottles to bond. Their father is in a nursing home, with such advanced dementia he can no longer put together a sentence. Ricky jollies him along. When he starts singing the Nazi marching songs of his youth, Ricky simply sings one of his Italian love songs to drown him out. Seidl knows his suburban fascists and can paint them with just a couple of strokes; you see immediately how things have been.
It’s not much of a living singing in one-star hotel bars, but Ricky’s needs are few; he can rent his house out to tourists and sleep in one of
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