“Rimini”—the Tragicomedy of the Italian Coast Off-Season

By Jeffrey Sipe and Nina Rodriguez

Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s “Rimini” is billed as a comedy but for a comedy it is not exactly peppered with laughs. The comedy, instead, is steeped in so much irony that the few laughs it does provoke are likely to be as painful as they are funny.

The film tells the story of washed-up lounge singer Richie Bravo (Michael Thomas) who is spending the winter in the doldrums of an off-season resort town where he is reduced to performing for aging groups of retirees, working his magic on a number of older women who still find a thrill in bedding the once popular singer. For Bravo, the trysts are a sideline to supplement whatever fees he collects for his singing gigs.

There’s a good deal of somewhat explicit sex involving Bravo and his matrons and there has been a lot written about the unattractiveness of sex scenes involving older people. It generally adds to the depressive malaise that the film dwells on, but the subject of elderly sex was dealt with as far back as 1997 by Jonathan Nossiter in “Sunday,” which displayed far more compassion than Seidl depicts in “Rimini.”

Seidl is a confrontational filmmaker who does, indeed, weave comedy into his cinematic confrontations with generally off-center characters. His 2014 documentary, “In the Basement,” explores what people really do in their basements and it goes far beyond the woodworking and carpentry that many of us remember our fathers doing years ago. And he followed up “Rimini” with “Sparta” which follows the story of Richie Bravo’s brother who, it turns out, is a pedophile.

“Rimini” is full of dysfunctional characters none more than Bravo. He has managed to skate by as his career tanks scraping money from whatever source he can find. His days of getting by hook or by crook are suddenly interrupted by the arrival of Tessa, Bravo’s daughter, whom he abandoned and has not supported nearly since her birth. She has a Syrian boyfriend, is pregnant, and is now demanding the child support that he never paid—money that should have been paid to her mother.

The agony Bravo experiences as he faces his irresponsibility is palpable, and some of the movie’s best scenes are the confrontations between Bravo and Tessa. As often unlikeable as Bravo is before Tessa’s arrival, his realization of pain caused and his own failures as a father cut deep and Michael Thomas’s performances in these scenes are painfully realistic.

There is very little uplifting about “Rimini” from its characters to its visuals. Colors are so washed out that at certain points of the movie it almost seems as if it was shot in black and white. Snow blows along the seaside town, mirroring the internal lives of the characters, and Bravo’s performance among the scant winter-time vacationers appears black and white as well casting the whole endeavor into a realm that barely seems real.

In the end, Tessa gets her money and her father gets his comeuppance and a harsh slap in the face as he struggles to come to terms with a career and a personal life that has so faltered that it’s about to fall over a cliff. Having premiered at the Berlinale, “Rimini” received the main award at Gijón and reaches Mexican theaters this January. It is currently showing at the Compartimento Cinematográfico in San Miguel de Allende.