Rimini, winter

Richie Bravo and his brother organize their mother's funeral.

The father, afflicted with senile dementia, lives in a nursing home.

Richie, a former pop music star, wanders among the deserted beaches, refugees, fog, and rain, wearing his Viking fur coat and his ever-present Texan boots.

He has surpassed 60 years, just like his fans, especially adoring women who go to hotels to listen to and dream with his love songs, for which he also provides intimate optional paid services, allowing himself to be treated like a gigolo/stallion.

The first shots linger on the nursing home's guests, all of them in wheelchairs, singing songs as directed by the healthcare staff.

These are followed by songs sung to the hotel guests, talking about love, life, and happiness.

Each person has their own connection to the past, more or less present and disturbing. A young woman searches for Richie: she is the daughter he hasn't seen in years, a neglected, abandoned daughter who demands financial redemption for herself and her mother.

Accompanied by a group of Syrians, including her boyfriend, she travels with them in a trailer and refuses to leave until her father has given her what she is owed.

His sexual encounters with Emilia, whose deaf mother is in the next room, reward Bravo with never enough money, just like the earnings from his meager concerts, paid by a Romanian agent, to accumulate enough money to give to his daughter, especially since the former star is generous and enjoys drinking and offering drinks.

The "prodigal daughter," as he calls her, doesn't give up, and she will make a surprising decision, just as Richie will use it to accumulate enough money to get rid of his daughter.

The first episode of Seidl's second trilogy revisits his familiar themes, such as those of women who pay men to satisfy their sexual appetites; in the first installment, "Paradise: Love," set in Africa, mature "sugar mamas" entertain themselves with local young men, while here, in Rimini, the bitter "Dolce Vita," as Richie calls it, just like there, squalor becomes art, that restless and livid art that lingers on the "beauty" of bodies we have grown unaccustomed to, those bodies ravaged by life, age, and a past that frames a bitter and tired present, albeit still alive.

"Let's cling to love," Bravo sings, dressed in sequins, a vest, and a corset... to sell himself and play the slot machines.

As heartbreaking as ever, Seidl: a fierce gaze like that of his documentaries... never so far from fiction, a fiction so attentive and relentless that it sometimes seems too clear to be true.

A tale of lives bent and scarred by the past.

A tale of lives, of a past that resurfaces indigestible and savory for everyone, including the father in the nursing home, with that marked body, in pain, in responsibility, and at the same time unable to let it go forever, and that childlike mind now lost, crying and calling for the mother.

That's why he chose Franz Schubert's "Gute Nacht" from "Winterreise" for his elderly parent.

...like a stranger I appeared,

03-May-2023 by Beatrice