WICKED GAMES: RIMINI SPARTA

BÖSE SPIELE: RIMINI SPARTA

Austria, Germany, France | 2023 | 205 min

The tormented fortunes of two brothers, children of an elderly parent now suffering from dementia, alternate in Ulrich Seidl's lengthy film. In Rimini, the once successful crooner Richie Bravo now only performs for an audience of elderly tourists, forced from time to time to prostitute himself or rent out his villa to make a living. And when his daughter, abandoned at an early age, pops up in his life to ask for everything she has been denied, the situation becomes even more complicated. Ewald, on the other hand, lives in Romania, where he works as a technical engineer. He leaves his fiancée when some of his hidden impulses take over, to the point that he quits his job and his woman and moves to the hinterland, where he opens a judo school that could help him quell his inclinations. A poignant work on the absence of mothers and on two figures of failed fathers, a sorrowful climax to the cinema of a very lucid observer of our times. (a.s.)