Rimini

(Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2022)

The first four shots of a movie. Very crucial.

Shot 1: Ten (count them!) elderly folk lined up in a planimetric row for the camera, led in a care-facility sing-along (we’ll get this arrangement repeated later on). Shot 2: An old man trying a door – which is covered with the blown-up photo of an exotic setting – that is locked, so he curses. Shot 3: Same old man at what appears to be the opposite end of the same corridor; another photo-mural, another locked door, more and worse swearing. Shot 4: A third door somewhere else in the same institution, yet another mural (by now, it’s a gag sequence): third blockage, extreme obscenity of speech. Time for the title.

This can only be an Ulrich Seidl film.

Rimini marks out typical Seidl territory: static, flat, symmetrical frame compositions (Bert Rebhandl’s entry in the 2022 book Picturing Austrian Cinema discusses this aspect of Seidl specifically), uncannily locating the bisected-halves in every room and architectural edifice; bleached-out colour scheme; characters in long-held wide shots; no conventional music score; jet-black humour from go to whoa. Endlessly seriality, organised in rows posed at various angles and perspectives, wherever the eye goes: ten identical (or near-enough) bodies, twenty chairs, fifty huts. Only the settings, and the occupation of the main character(s), change in Seidl.

In a typology of cinematic modes, Seidl finds the sour spot right between Quirky and Weird – and that’s the groove he stays in and mines. Watching Rimini, I realised something essential. There are movies where you discover each new space/place/locale – and its quirky weirdness – with the central character as s/he encounters and explores them for the first time. And there are other movies, such as Seidl’s, in which the characters never notice the weirdness of anything around them, since they live in it every day. The entire perception of the picturesque strangeness of (semi)ordinary lives is thus shunted over to our side as viewers. Are we to be amazed, delighted, deranged, disapproving? It is sometimes a heavy spectatorial burden to bear. But Seidl’s cinema is nothing if not relentless, in both its design and its intent.

Since we are in Italy’s Rimini (the companion film Sparta [2022] – both were originally conceived as parts of a single project, like the Paradise [2012/2013] trilogy – was shot in Romania), the director’s gesture is anti-Fellini: search in vain for the beach parties and erotic hi-jinx which characterised the Master's recreated memories of his birthplace in Amarcord (1973). Here it’s all dinky clubs, forlorn kiosks, and blinking-neon two-dollar shops full of anachronistic junk from the ‘space age’ of pop culture …

And the anti-hero? This time Seidl paints the indelible portrait of a washed-up pop-ballad singer, Richie Bravo (brilliantly incarnated by Michael Thomas, who also wrote the super-kitsch song repertoire). Playing (to a pre-recorded backing tape) the decrepit tourist resorts of Rimini, flogging his back-catalogue merch, hanging out in his private hotel (abandoned because of the pandemic?), prostituting himself with female fans who are, like he, long "past their prime", and even stooping to a bit of blackmail, Richie is a total horror. Seidl said in a press conference at the Gijón film festival that his aim is not (only) to mock, but to reveal “humanity – right in the abyss”. Fair enough.

And – as frequently in Seidl – the beds are dirty, the flesh is fat and sagging, the conversations are null and void. Life as a sad and entropic cliché. Seidl tends to be parsimonious with plot moves (and they never quite fall where you would expect them to, which is good), but the significant spike in proceedings occurs here with the arrival (as in many a contemporary family drama) of the adult daughter, Tessa (Tessa Göttlicher), who Richie has barely known – watch how Seidl does that plot move with a single, sudden shot.

Just don’t expect any sentimentally redemptive closure, in the manner of those Bill Murray vehicles Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch, 2005) and On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola, 2020), or Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come Knocking (2005), on this point from Rimini; the film offers a gruesome cruise through the ports of alienation, affectlessness and amorality. And Tessa hardly softens toward her Dad for a single moment, which offers a strong tonic by film’s end.

Seidl manages to have it both ways: he damns the emptiness of modern life, while humorously exploiting its reigning stereotypes of race, age and gender. He “glimpses humanity” only when it suits him. How else to account for the endless shots of refugees stoically hanging outside some cubicle in the cold and rain? Or that exotic lover of Tessa who lurks in the background of every scene he’s in and never utters a word? Or, indeed, that entire Visconti-esque plot move, late in the piece, where this lover and his entire community-entourage take up uninvited residence in Richie’s “mansion” (aka Monument to Himself)? They lounge, they smoke, they sleep, they dance …

Moral Lesson time: is this the slow, agonising death of Richie Bravo, or his gradual rebirth? What you pick as an answer and a response depends on how “ethical” you find Seidl’s cinema, in general, to be. The same type of question we tend to ask, in varying registers, of Michael Haneke, or Harmony Korine.

In Rimini, everything leans – a bit too heavily – on the historical allegory of a now-senile father (Hans-Michael Rehberg in his final performance), who occasionally betrays the signs of his Nazi past by singing patriotic/Romantic songs or babbling some ideology. This character is a suitable prop for Seidel’s often infectious sense of humour: the more out-of-it and demented the old guy gets, the funnier his reactions and interjections in social situations (such as a funeral for his wife, who he has ceased remembering).

There’s an overarching meaning to the entire structure. A past denied is a repressed content that must be faced and dealt with on its inevitable return: that’s both the recipe for a horror movie, and a scenario of tough love and hard redemption, particularly within family-based (melo)dramas. Just as Seidl sits between Quirky and Weird, he also activates both possibilities of the denied-past model at once: history is a nightmarish trauma, and yet, within personal relationships, some small measure of forgiveness and progress can be forged.

Seidl’s own mordant sensibility comes out of the evident friction between those options: what the historical past has left his characters is a legacy of muckiness, decay, and amoral exploitation within their nominally “apolitical” lives. It’s hard to find – remember the first four shots – the exit (this is why every Seidl film seems exactly the same) from that deadlock, and the director is not about to point it out for us.

© Adrian Martin November/December 2022