Richie Bravo is part egomaniacal Italian gigolo, part Austrian pop star, part unhappy boy. The death of his mother forces Richie to leave his second home in Rimini, Italy. The carefree man with the grey mane returns to his teenage bedroom in Austria, where Charlton Heston can still be seen flexing his biceps, and childhood hero, the plucky indigenous Winettou is still alive. Accompanied by schlager hits he bids farewell to the attic room of his parents’ house with a bottle of schnapps in his hand. All that remains for him to do is to follow the path his hunger for fame has outlined for him in the sands of the beach in Rimini… 

Ulrich Seidl has fooled his audience many times. Although this Berlinale contender resembles a documentary study of a character’s psyche, it is in fact a docu-fiction hybrid. A kind of vérité mentir or lie of truth. Seidl’s ability to find his protagonists is enviable: if there are people on an African safari who are uncritically proud of their animal trophies, he will find them; if someone worships Hitlers in an attic in the countryside, he will film them. The classic Austrian filmmaker has created an elegiacally painful, even romantic film about an antihero in the winter months in Rimini (could there be a more depressing setting?) who on the surface is perverse, neglectful, and frivolous, but under the surface is brooding, and craves the love of everyone around him (including the audience).