Review: Ulrich Seidl's 'Rimini' has bad music, worse sex and a riveting lead turn

Richie Bravo, the aging Austrian lounge singer shambling his way through Ulrich Seidl’s grimly fascinating new movie, “Rimini,” sure knows his way around a crummy hotel. By day or night you might find him at the bar, contentedly drowning his sorrows, or in the dining room, crooning his creamy power ballads for the politely smiling older tourists who’ve paid to bump shoulders with a former celebrity. And if you have access to the right hotel room — which, thanks to Seidl’s particularly punishing brand of cinematic voyeurism, you do — you might find Richie baring his paunchy, tattooed flesh as he enthusiastically services a female admirer, collecting a few extra euros for his troubles.

Starkly transactional sex scenes, expunged of movie-star glamour and filmed with an irreducible mix of cruelty and pathos, are a Seidl signature, most obviously in “Paradise: Love,” his sun-scorched 2012 portrait of African sex tourism. Like his acclaimed fellow Austrian Michael Haneke, though with a touch more formal spontaneity and greater reliance on improvisation and nonprofessional actors, Seidl has a well-earned, festival-nurtured reputation for cinematic severity. His exacting mise-en-scène and unblinking camerawork serve an aesthetically narrow yet infinitely adaptable purpose: to shine a harsh light on the perils of human exploitation, and to expose the bad faith, hypocrisy and all-around moral blindness of the European bourgeoisie (and, by extension, of the art-house audiences who sign up for the ride).

“Rimini,” his first narrative feature in the near-decade since he made “Paradise: Love” and its two companion works (“Paradise: Faith” and “Paradise: Hope,” naturally), is in some ways one of his mellower, less grimly confrontational movies. Still, even as I write these words I’m reminded of the last time a Seidl film was sold to me with similar “it’s not that bad, actually” reassurances. (“Oh, good,” a colleague mused in response, “maybe it’ll open with a puppy getting kicked in the face.”) Let’s just say that this time Seidl and his regular co-writer, Veronika Franz, have tethered their provocations to a protagonist who can be as curiously endearing as he is repellent, and whose long-faded pop-idol magnetism can still at times charm a crowd and even a movie camera.

That charm can function as both a defense and a weapon, though mostly it’s just part of the singer’s neverending hustle. When we first meet Richie (played by a hulking, mesmerizing, fully committed Michael Thomas), he’s returning to his nondescript Austrian hometown for his mother’s funeral — a sad occasion that briefly introduces his younger brother, Ewald (Georg Friedrich), and their dementia-stricken father (the late Hans-Michael Rehberg in his final screen role). But then it’s right back to the off-season gloom of Rimini, the northern Italian resort town where Richie stays in a villa filled with life-size cardboard cutouts of himself and other tacky monuments to his bygone glory.

It becomes clear just how bygone that glory is when the cash-strapped Richie rents out the villa to a couple of adoring fans, and later when he pawns some cheap-looking jewelry. When he isn’t belting cheesy love songs on a chintzily decked-out stage or doing his jiggly gigolo routine, Richie spends a lot of time wandering the chilly, misty waterfront in his sealskin jacket and frequenting local bars and casinos. It’s during one of those bar sessions that he’s confronted by Tessa (first-time actor Tessa Göttlicher), a flinty young woman who claims to be the daughter he hasn’t seen or contacted in years, and who demands many thousands of euros in unpaid child support.

That Richie responds to Tessa’s demands with mealymouthed acquiescence and apparent remorse suggests he’s more sincere (or more gullible) than he looks. His efforts to get her the cash — which means more singing in bright-colored blazers, more comically awful sex and even a bit of revenge-porn blackmail — introduce a few dribbles of plot and underscore some of the movie’s superficial similarities to, of all things, “The Wrestler.” In that 2008 movie, Mickey Rourke also played a past-his-prime performer with a beefy, beaten-down frame, a bleached-blond mane and an estranged daughter. But he was also working with a director, Darren Aronofsky, whose go-for-the-jugular expressionism could hardly be further removed from Seidl’s cool, analytical detachment.

Unlike “The Wrestler,” “Rimini” has little interest in redeeming its principal character, mainly because, in Seidl’s comprehensively dim view of the human species, redemption seems neither possible nor even necessary. Blithely good-natured and generally immune to shame, Richie Bravo is an equal-opportunity exploiter and exploitee; he’s happy to allow others to use his home, his fame and his body, and to use others in return. The sudden reappearance of a long-abandoned daughter may throw his moral failures into harsh relief, but Seidl couldn’t be less interested in effecting a reconciliation. What seems most pertinent about Tessa, really, is the quietly hovering presence of her Arab boyfriend (Moumen Abd El Rahman), who brings out Richie’s not-so-latent racism and Islamophobia in ways that reverberate throughout the movie.

As Richie wanders the streets and beaches of Rimini, he barely takes notice of the many homeless Black men and women around him. Seidl, of course, ensures that we notice, arranging these figures in silently reproachful formations at the edges of his meticulously composed tableaux. Frankly, I’m not convinced that this kind of indictment — a variant of which Haneke pulled off more artfully, and more damningly, in his 2017 drama, “Happy End” — lands with the force that Seidl intends. His use of nonspeaking Black and Arab actors to wag his finger about class, race and immigration scarcely seems more principled, really, than Richie’s wholesale indifference.

Subtler and more creepily resonant is the scene in which Richie pays another visit home and sings one of his schanger tunes, while his father, slipping in and out of lucidity, responds with an old Nazi Party anthem. The juxtaposition of their voices, both competitive and contrapuntal, effectively lays bare what “Rimini” has been about all along: the deep root that bigotry can take within a culture, and its insidious ability to both hide and reproduce itself in each successive generation. The family itself becomes the unit that keeps old prejudices and perversions alive.

I suspect there may be more to discover on that front in “Sparta,” Seidl’s controversy-plagued follow-up to “Rimini,” which by all accounts focuses on Richie’s brother, Ewald, and his struggles with pedophilia. Last year, Der Spiegel published allegations that Seidl had not informed his underage actors or their guardians about the movie’s content, or that they would be filmed in situations involving nudity and violence. Although “Sparta” premiered in competition at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, it was yanked from several other festivals, including Toronto, in the wake of these charges, which Seidl has refuted.

Beyond the most basic observation — that Seidl has long blurred the lines between fiction and documentary in his pursuit of an unadorned, squirm-inducing cinematic realism — any judgment of “Sparta” will have to await a viewing and a proper release. (A 205-minute combination of both films, titled “Wicked Games Rimini Sparta,” premiered recently at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.) “Rimini,” for its part, has arrived on these shores as a stand-alone work, and its power, alienating and transporting by turns, has survived the journey undimmed. It’s worth your time, your discomfort, your possible scorn and your weirdly grudging affection, maybe all at once.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.