There are countless horror movies that exploit the particular uncanniness of a holiday resort in winter, but none of them have featured a monster quite like Richie Bravo. The anti-hero of Ulrich Seidl’s latest film, Rimini, he’s a hulking, middle-aged lounge singer of limitless appetites and venality. After singing another of his terrible songs – a string of perfectly awful pastiches by Fritz Ostermeyer and Herwig Zamernik – he slithers off-stage and supplements his income by having sex for money with his adoring middle-aged fans. Seidl wrote the part of Richie for Michael Thomas after witnessing him sing a Frank Sinatra song on the set of their previous collaboration Import/Export. Watching Richie mumble dirty talk with a fan sat on his face, you appreciate that one of that earlier film’s apparent projects – to film the most depressing sex scenes known to man – is still central to Seidl’s sensibilities.
Then something unexpected happens. A woman, played by Tessa Göttlicher, turns up claiming to be Richie’s estranged daughter. Richie’s initial instinct is to hit on her, and upon realising she’s a blood relative he simply brushes it under the carpet without a second thought. (Seidl might be inspired here by the infamous anecdote about Ryan O’Neal obliviously chatting up his daughter Tatum at Farrah Fawcett’s funeral.) The relationship between an ageing rogue and an estranged daughter is a well-travelled Hollywood cliche, one that’s been transplanted into arthouse territory by Darren Aronofsky in The Wrestler and Sofia Coppola in Somewhere. Göttlicher’s Tessa, though, is older than the moppets American films tend to deploy in these roles. She doesn’t want a daddy to make her feel complete, she wants to berate Richie about his lack of financial support and abandonment of her when she was a child. As a result, the drama is less redemptive than even Aronofsky is willing to countenance, yet you still breathe a sigh of relief: at last, there’s someone capable of standing up to Richie.
Look carefully at the early funeral scene in Rimini and you’ll see a brief, non-speaking appearance by Georg Friedrich, recently the star of the acclaimed prison drama Great Freedom. Originally, Seidl wanted to make a film about two Austrian brothers pursuing their careers in different countries: Richie the lounge singer in Italy, and Friedrich as Ewald, a judo instructor in Romania. During editing, Seidl and his wife and co-writer Veronika Franz (who co-directed the acclaimed 2015 horror movie Goodnight Mommy) decided to split the project into two films. The second, Sparta, is just emerging from a cloud of controversy after the German news magazine Der Spiegel accused Seidl of not informing the parents of child actors that Ewald was written as a paedophile, and of forcing child actors to play traumatic scenes. It’s a risk to write too much about an ongoing scandal conducted largely in a language you don’t speak fluently, but at the time of writing it seems Der Spiegel‘s article is guilty of some selective information itself – reporting that a child actor vomited after playing a troubling scene, for instance, without adding that his parents said he suffered from car sickness. The festival screenings for Sparta that were suspended after the Spiegel article are coming back, and although the film has no UK release date yet the release of Rimini can be interpreted as a sign that British distributors do not think this incident has tarnished his reputation.
Seidl was one of a number of international directors who emerged in the late 90s whose artistic credo semmed to be J.G. Ballard’s desire to “rub the human face in its own vomit, then force it to look in the mirror”. Today, he’s nearly the last man standing…
The worst thing you can confidently say about Seidl is that his sensibility – his attraction to the macabre and cruel, his tendency to blur the lines between documentary and fiction – left him wide open to allegations like this. And this is where the scandal around Sparta does reflect on Rimini, because it asks broader questions about how Seidl’s work fits into the world today. Seidl was one of a number of international directors who emerged in the late ’90s whose artistic credo seemed to be J.G. Ballard’s desire to “rub the human face in its own vomit, then force it to look in the mirror”. Today, he’s nearly the last man standing: Lars von Trier recently announced his retirement, while Todd Solondz and Seidl’s countryman Michael Haneke are leaving longer and longer gaps in between films. Seidl, though, remains productive, and so his films are useful in answering the following question: what does this ultra-misanthrope school have to offer now the selfishness, cruelty and hopelessness it claims to expose have gone from being society’s dirty secrets to something everyone is painfully aware of?
Rimini‘s answer is, hearteningly, quite a lot. It’s a flawed film; its near-two-hour run-time makes you wonder what the original cut, with Sparta interspersed, would have been like. The Kubrickian one-point-perspective shots of the titular seaside resort in winter fog are impressive, but perhaps too frequently used. It will also be a matter of taste whether you find the scenes with Richie’s father, a senile man who occasionally slips back to his Nazi boyhood, to be vital in contextualising Richie’s loathsomeness or simply another shock button for Seidl to slam his fist on.
Yet Richie’s father, played in his last role by Hans-Michael Reberg, is also afforded the film’s final moment, one which is sadder and more humane than you may expect. Rimini is a remorseless downer, but it obeys rules of tragedy that Shakespeare would have recognised: for the tragedy to work, there has to at least be a possibility that Richie will choose a better path. As meagre as it sounds, that’s more of a shaft of light than Seidl has let into his films before. Seidl will, perhaps, always be followed around by Werner Herzog’s quote about his early film Animal Love, where the great Bavarian said “Never have I looked so directly into hell” – and he’d worked five times with Klaus Kinski, so he knows what he’s talking about. But Richie is merely on the road to hell. If he proves unwilling to change course, then Thomas and Göttlicher give performances robust enough to maintain a sense of energy and vigour even at the script’s grimmest moments. If Seidl ends up taking Der Spiegel to court over the Sparta allegations, and he wants to prove he isn’t a completely heartless monster, he could do worse than show the judge this.
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