Wicked Games Rimini Sparta (2023) by Ulrich Seidl - Review

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by Ulrich Seidl

grade: 8

Wicked Games Rimini Sparta, through the story of three people, immediately becomes a picture of the era in which we live, of a sick world in which everyone seems to be hopelessly alone, destined never to find the longed-for serenity. At the Diagonale’23.

Three stories

The feature film Wicked Games Rimini Sparta – which had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival 2023 and subsequently was included in the programme of the Diagonale’23 – has a very special genesis. Director Ulrich Seidl started this important project six years ago, initially planning to make a film about the story of three men and as many generations, while telling us how important past mistakes can change people’s lives forever. From this initial project (initially titled simply Wicked Games), therefore, two films were subsequently born, Rimini and Sparta, focusing on the story of two brothers who now live far away from their hometown, but who remain inextricably linked to their elderly father (Hans Michael Rehberg, here in his last appearance on screen), now in a retirement home and suffering from dementia.

Rimini – presented as a world premiere in competition at the Berlinale 2022 – tells the story of singer Richie Bravo (played by Michael Thomas), who currently lives in Rimini, and who was once very successful, but now only performs for an audience of elderly tourists, forced from time to time to prostitute himself and rent his villa in order to earn a living. He will therefore find himself in great difficulty when his daughter, whom he abandoned when she was a child, visits him to ask for money.

Sparta, on the other hand, focuses on the story of Richie’s brother, Ewald (played by Georg Friedrich), and because of the sensitive topics it deals with, it has triggered a lot of controversy. Ewald lives in Romania, where he works as an industrial technician and has a girlfriend. Gradually, however, some of his impulses get the upper hand, to the point that he has to leave his job and his girlfriend and move to the hinterland, where he opens a judo school, so that he can be close to the local children and try to calm his inclinations towards paedophilia, even if only in his imagination.

Wicked Games Rimini Sparta, therefore, is a complete, monumental work, comprising both films and, at the same time, giving life to a merciless portrait of the world in which we live. A world in which no one is truly innocent, in which everyone is victim and perpetrator at the same time, in which the past finds its sad declination also in the present, in which there is no hope of any redemption.

In order to connect Rimini and Sparta in a single feature film, therefore, the editing was once again entrusted to Monika Willi (recently nominated for an Oscar for Best Editing for Todd Field’s Tár ) and shows us the vicissitudes of the two brothers (to whom their father acts as a trait d’union) initially in an alternating form (as regards, in particular, the scenes filmed in winter), and then concentrating more and more on Ewald’s vicissitudes. And so, in Wicked Games Rimini Sparta, we see how the two have much more in common than might initially seem: a difficult childhood, probably ended too soon, together with a desire to run far away to find happiness or, at least, redemption elsewhere.

Ulrich Seidl’s meticulous and precise direction shows us their stories in a compassionate, never banal, but also extremely pessimistic and disillusioned way, ensuring that even the locations – often cold, alienating – play a fundamental role. And so, Wicked Games Rimini Sparta, through the story of three people, immediately becomes a picture of the era in which we live, of a sick world in which everyone seems to be hopelessly alone, destined never to find the longed-for serenity. A world in which failure means losing oneself forever, in which the past is more alive than ever, in which old songs from dramatic times still resound in the shabby corridors of a retirement home.