THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
We have known for a long time that the Austrians are capable of the best (Mozart) as well as the worst (Hitler). This evidence has earned this nation the emergence, within it, of a category of artists whose feeling of spite and anger has given shape to a kind of anti-national scouring whose vigor borders on infinite humor. Thomas Bernhard has distinguished himself magnificently in the genre for the literary category. Ulrich Seidl, soon to be 70 years old and a former student of the Jesuits, has been working on it in the cinema for forty years, not without success, despite what his opponents say. It was the transition to fiction in the 2000s that raised this documentary filmmaker by vocation, in this capacity already very rare, to international recognition.
Dog Days (2001), Import Export (2006), then the trilogy of Heaven (2012-2013) mark the main stages of a particularly drastic undertaking to unclog Austrian conduits. The picture that emerges, drawn with a line, the scent of a cold room, combines stuffy provincialism, moral turpitude, the cacochymic West, asthmatic neocolonialism, sexual maceration, the National Socialist remugles that rise to the surface of triumphant neoliberalism. . Everything that normally should be stored under the carpet.
This film could appear as a trash version of “When I was a singer” (2006), by Xavier Giannoli
Rimini, the film that we are discovering today, would make a blue flower in comparison. His hero, Richie Bravo, Austrian crooner of the eighties, a slicked-back, paunchy blond mass, leaves behind his demented old father who hums Nazi songs in his retirement home to take up his winter quarters on the Adriatic, where trains of rombières, one foot in widowhood, the other in the grave, come, powdered cheeks and alluring underwear, to haunt the hotels of the city where the Casanova of the Danube is produced. Richie, who adds the meager emoluments of his lyrical performances to those of the paid loves with some of his most hardened fans, thus lives a more modest vacation than he wants to make believe, between the ghostly reactivation of his golden age and the penetrating fogs that plunge the seaside town into winter desolation.
This film, which could appear as a trashy version of when i was a singer (2006), by Xavier Giannoli, is however complicated by an unexpected return. That of Richie’s daughter, accompanied by rather threatening companions, who seems very unhappy with the early abandonment where her father threw her, and consequently comes to claim from him, in the absence of feelings, the sum of the pensions he does not have. paid. There will be feeling, however, in this bitter film turning to melodrama, and even tenderness, which we will never have doubted that it touches, at the same time as the heart of this phenomenal loser who is Bravo, that , supposedly brazen, by Ulrich Seidl himself.
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