Böse Spiele: Rimini Sparta

In Rimini (2022) and Sparta (2022), Ulrich Seidl followed the lives of two brothers, Richie and Ewald, respectively. The former is a crooner long past his prime yet still beloved by hordes of late-middle-aged female fans who can also buy his sexual attention; the latter is a technician living in Romania and wrestling with his pedophile desires. When Seidl commenced this endeavour, these two tales were supposed to be told in one film – and now they finally are! The result, Wicked Games: Rimini Sparta, offers a staggeringly different experience of the narrative(s). It's far more cerebral, above all a work of ideas. In the film's first, winter-set movement, the two strands are tightly interwoven, mirroring, complementing each other into a devastatingly bleak vision of lost childhood as a state of mind. The second, summer-set movement is focused on Ewald and the Spartan fantasies he lives out with a band of boys in a fortress they build, now seen as a sublimation of his father's obsession with German fascism that makes him spout Nazi songs and slogans when he barely remembers anything else (while the father of one little Spartan tries to turn the boy against Ewald by brutally ‘educating’ him to embrace evil). All of which makes Wicked Games: Rimini Sparta a more disconcerting, disconsolate and heart-broken, but also in many ways richer version of the project. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)