The extreme harshness, sometimes loaded with unexpected poetics, that characterizes the cinema of the Austrian Ulrich Seidl, is capable of extracting its particular symbology from the murky waters of the European subsoil.
This time, her target is two brothers who have just buried her mother and whose father survives her in a nursing home.
He is an old man with no memory who is assailed by strange memories.
He doesn't recognize his children, but he knows how to sing hymns from the past.
In this dark and horrifying mirror, the two sons, the main characters of the Rimini
and Sparta
diptych, inadvertently gaze at each other
.
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Both films take place outside of Austria.
One of the brothers is a seedy singer who returns to Rimini, the tourist town on the Adriatic Coast where he lives and to which Seidl dedicates the title of the first film.
An out-of-season non-place that Seidl portrays almost as a floating abstraction, seedy and dying, in a strange haze as his main character walks across the screen in an old fur coat and dirty blonde hair.
Played by an operatic Michael Thomas, it is about a drunken singer, Richie, a poor trilero with the air of a decadent gigolo in hotels for the Imserso.
Ulrich Seidl, last November at the Gijón festival.PACO PAREDES
Her brother, the protagonist of the second film,
Sparta,
could be her nemesis.
Shaven-headed, reserved and icy, he moves to Romania to meet a woman, an adventure he abandons due to his attraction to children.
Invaded by the monster, the character played by the disturbing Georg Friedrich decides to set up a sports school called Sparta.
02:53
Trailer for the movie 'Sparta'
Georg Friedrich in 'Sparta'.
The morbid truculence of
Rimini,
with its erotic
eurotrash,
makes way for the dark turbidity of
Sparta
, forming a sordid diptych in search of the ghosts of Nazism: the traces of fascist memory are hidden in the father's dementia.
It is a matter that, of course, is not discussed, but in a revealing sequence the singing son hums a love tune while the father sings a Nazi hymn.
Underground violence, shame and guilt emerge in the depressing hallway of the nursing home.
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The Austrian filmmaker, who has defended himself from the controversy that has surrounded the filming of
Sparta
after a report by
Der Spiegel
that accused Seidl of hiding the subject of his film from the children's families, portrays the desperate drift of the two siblings.
The gloomy heritage of fascism can be read beyond the paternal shadow, from the development architecture that crosses the staging of
Rimini
to the cult of youth in
Sparta.
A rosary of social pathologies cultivated in the well of forgetfulness.
Rimini
Director:
Ulrich Seidl.
Cast:
Michael Thomas, Tessa Gottlicher, Hans-Michael Rehberg, Inge Maux, Claudia Martini.
Genre:
black comedy, drama.
Austria, 2022.
Duration:
114 minutes.
Premiere: March 24.
Sparta
Director:
Ulrich Seidl.
Cast:
Georg Friedrich, Hans-Michael Rehberg, Marius Ignat.
Genre:
drama.
Austria, 2022.
Duration:
101 minutes.
Premiere: March 24.
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