Death's Door

 

RIMINI (2023) (B) - Richie Bravo's best days are behind him, and in middle age his gut is in front of him. He hangs out in Rimini, an Italian seaside resort town where only diehards come out in the winter, some of them to watch Bravo, a onetime Austrian pop star, belt out his corny Italian love songs. He makes money on the side sleeping with his older female fans for cash.

 

This film from Ulrich Seidl (the "Paradise" trilogy) has been described as darkly hilarious, but I found it pretty depressing, albeit headlined by a bumbling and self-aware lead, played by the actual crooner Michael Thomas, for whom Seidl wrote the film. Hanging over the antics of Bravo is the death of his mother at the beginning of the film and the physical/mental decline of his father, who withers away in a nursing home. 

And then there is Bravo's estranged daughter (Tessa Gottlicher), who appears in his life and is expecting payback (some of it literal) for having abandoned her and her mother for her entire childhood. She has a Muslim boyfriend, which is a challenge for Bravo, though you sense he is papering over his true feelings. (The dead town seems to have its share of street people, presumably immigrants.) The father-daughter face-off dominates the second half of the film. 

Bravo is a drunk and a hack -- he is not above hocking jewelry or renting out his house to make ends meet (or even deploying a little blackmail when desperate) -- but he still fashions himself as a stud in middle age. He keeps his hair long, sports a knee-length sealskin (or so he says) coat, and wears a girdle when he performs on stage (doing glorified karaoke featuring a cheap backing track). Most of the time he can still please a woman -- the sex among the geezers gets pretty graphic at times -- but his whiskey-dick too often betrays him. He knows that his fans are easy marks. His main slam is Annie (Claudia Martini), who is a tiger in bed but also must tend to her own dying mother who lives with her and needs a lot of attention. To watch two older people try to be porn stars under the literal shadow of death can be a haunting challenge for the viewer. 

I appreciated that depth of despair as much as the awkward humor that meandered throughout the lazily paced film. This could have been a more frivolous enterprise -- Thomas could have played Bravo more like The Dude in "The Big Lebowski" -- but instead Seidl crafted a bittersweet paean to the winter of our years.

TASTE OF CHERRY (1998) (B) - This Iranian classic has one of the best elevator pitches in cinema: a man intending to commit suicide drives around in his car in search of someone who will agree to bury him under a cherry tree. And this slow-paced, mostly ad-libbed film from Abbas Kiarostami delivers exactly what it promises, unfolding over 95 thoughtful minutes.

 

Homayoun Ershadi stars as Mr. Badii, a depressed man who never reveals the reason why he has dug his own grave and now seeks out a helper -- with a decent offer of money as payment for the helper's labors -- who would be tasked with checking on him in the morning and either fetching him out of the hole (if the suicide attempt did not succeed or was aborted) or shoveling 20 spadefuls of dirt on his dead body. Kiarostami, like his contemporary (and occasional collaborator) Jafar Panahi, shoots a lot of the scenes in Badii's car, as he makes his pitch first to a Kurdish soldier, then to a reluctant seminary student who objects on obvious religious grounds. 

It is not until he snares a taxidermy professor, Mr. Bagheri (Abdolrahman Bagheri), that he finds a willing accomplice. But Bagheri will give Badii much to consider, including a long fable about a different suicidal man who found the will to live after sampling a mulberry fruit and regaining his senses. Kiarostami gives us a lot of driving and talking, sometimes just hovering his camera at bird's-eye view and observing Badii's Range Rover navigating the rural dirt roads. That technique suggests the journey of life, as narrated by random Greek chorus members. And Ershadi (the only cast member to go on to have a full acting career), with his brooding leading-man looks, projects the perfect air of mystery and humanity.

I won't divulge the ending (what there is of one), but suffice it to say that Kiarostami's bold switch of narrative devices at the end continues to generate debates three decades after he shot it.  

Kiarostami's more recent films have included the so-so "Certified Copy" and "Like Someone in Love," after a heyday around the turn of the millennium with films like "Crimson Gold" and "The Wind Will Carry Us." 

BONUS TRACK

An interesting choice for the final credits of "A Taste of Cherry" is Louis Armstrong's "St. James Infirmary Blues":