Sometimes you don’t realize how regressive & puritanical most American cinema is until you watch a European art film. For instance, the recent Austrian-French drama Rimini was revelatory in just how squicked out most American filmmakers are about nude, elderly bodies. I’ve become so accustomed to seeing old naked bodies exploited for gross-out jump scares in American horror that it felt genuinely transgressive to see geriatric sex shot without shame or judgement. The nude-geriatric jump scare is a well established American tradition, dating at least as far back as the bathtub scene in Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. The practice has ramped up exponentially in recent years, though, and you can see elderly nudity depicted as skin-crawly grotesqueries in such buzzy horror titles as Barbarian, IT, It Follows, X, The Visit, The Witch, Hereditary, Midsommar, and (for the full Ari Aster trifecta) Beau is Afraid. Any one of those examples could be individually defended for their reasoning in perpetuating the trope, but as a group they do indicate a fairly damnable ageist trend. And so, when the elderly women of Rimini pay to have vigorous, onscreen sex with their favorite washed-up pop star, it’s surprisingly refreshing to see their sexual activities and sexual bodies presented in a matter-of-fact, semi-documentary style instead of the heightened American nightmare equivalent where they are shocking & gross.
Well, that’s not entirely true. The geriatric sex in Rimini is also shocking & gross, but only because of the context. The film itself is a shocking & gross character study of a shocking & gross man, played by Austrian actor Michael Thomas. Thomas stars as the fictional has-been pop singer Ricky Bravo, who drinks and fucks away the remaining scraps of his life in the off-season beachside hotel rooms of the titular Italian tourist town. The tourists have left for winter, so seemingly all that’s left in Rimini’s frozen-over water parks and hotel suites is Ricky Bravo’s horned-up fans, who are bussed in from distant Euro retirement homes to bask in his kitschy caricature of romance novel machismo. Ricky Bravo recalls a wide range of cornball sex symbols from decades past without parodying any one example in particular, instead approximating what it might be like if Meatloaf had starred in a 1980s Beauty and the Beast TV show instead of Ron Perlman. He even dresses in a ragged, beastly fur coat he tosses onto hotel room beds like a Viking pelt that he ravages his paying customers on top of, essentially wearing an unwashable cum rag around town between gigs. All of Bravo’s handsome affectations get increasingly grotesque when you squint at them in that way. He presents himself as a passionate lush, but he’s really just a lonely alcoholic and a low-effort gigolo. His decadence is decorated with the faded hallmarks of wealth from much brighter times, and it all looks so increasingly tacky in the cold, sober light of day – especially by the dozenth time his de-glamourized routine repeats onscreen.
Ricky Bravo’s racism also becomes increasingly apparent as his macho facade erodes. He sees himself as a progressive rebel who’s transcended the fascistic politics of his demented Nazi father (played by German actor Hans-Michael Rehberg in his final film role), whom he’s permanently parked in a grimly mundane nursing home. Bravo has, of course, absorbed plenty of his father’s racism despite himself, though, and the film is just as much about the crooner’s reactions to Rimini’s immigrant populations as it is about his unconventional sex work. While the tourists and seasonal workers can afford to leave town for the winter, there are large communities of homeless Muslim refugees who cannot. They slowly freeze to death on Rimini’s beaches while the town’s hotel rooms (and Ricky’s tacky mansion) remain mostly empty, since there is no practical way to make money off sheltering them. Bravo’s initial discomfort towards homeless refugees escalates to blatant hostility when his estranged daughter arrives in town with a silent Muslim boyfriend, demanding backpay for decades of missed child support. Bravo loses focus from satisfying his adoring fans (on stage and in bed) just long enough to scheme his way into the petty cash needed to purchase his daughter’s unearned affection, which means that he rips off and exploits the few people he can exert power over in the smallest, cruelest ways – all while looking down on the immigrant people who share his otherwise desolate city streets.
As you can likely tell, Rimini is grim. It’s also wryly funny, and the joke is always on Ricky Bravo for being such a drunken, dirty asshole. Even the camera’s extreme wide-shot framing treats Bravo’s life as a sad joke. He’s often shrunken to puny insignificance by the camera’s cold distancing, especially whenever he’s performing his dusty pop songs for his dwindling crowd of devotees. The camera never lets him get away with big-timing the audience, making sure we see every inch of the hotels’ drop-tile ceilings while he performs his sappy love ballads. The film’s funeral parlors, nursing homes, and hotel conference rooms make for oppressively bland mise-en-scène, and there’s never a hint of music video escapism in the pop singer’s meaningless life haunting those spaces. That’s not how the sex is shot, though. In the bedroom, the camera is borderline pornographic in its handheld, documentary framing of Ricky Bravo’s performance. Bravo’s only meaningful contribution to the world is his ability to provide pleasure & fantasy to elderly women who find him hot. You will not be surprised to learn that he eventually finds a way to fuck that up too. Rimini is a distinctly European flavor of feel-bad movie where everything eventually sours & rots for our squirmy displeasure at the nearest non-corporate theater. It says something, then, that it still has a less shameful, othering eye for shooting geriatric sex than mainstream American cinema, even if the people having that sex are inevitably demeaned & destroyed in other ways.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 