Rimini

Alex works as a project manager for an automobile parts supplier and is sick of it. It´s obvious just looking at him. When the next project is announced already at the final meeting for the last one, he leaves without a word and decides to change his life. He meets Anna, a film student, and lapses into the idea that she should shoot a documentary about his life. Maybe it will be easier for him to start a new life after first passing review over the old one?

At the same time, the detective Hans has a different problem: he was suspended because he got rough during an arrest. But he continues to investigate on his own initiative against a gang of teens who randomly attack passersby and publish the assaults as "Happy Slapping" videos on the Internet.

These two apparently entirely different characters are the main characters in Austrian filmmaker Peter Jaitz´s multi-layered premiere full-length feature film. The main theme is the difference between our perception of ourselves and the perception that others have of us.
Whereas Alex voluntarily throws away everything to escape the normalcy of his life, external circumstances force Hans to take things into his own hands. Both men seem obsessed, each in his own way.

Author and director Peter Jaitz displays great composure as he sends his driven characters out into the race for their existence. The film remains consistently frugal with its means - just like the actor Andreas Winter who, as Alex, brings inordinate emptiness and boredom to the screen simply through his facial expression, without much talking. Robert Reinagl, as Hans, plays a very convincing police detective, disillusioned with himself and the world.
When the film takes up phenomena relevant to the current day, such as "Happy Slapping", and the accompanying clips shot on cell phones, its critique remains so decent that the plot does not miss a beat. A coherent overall picture emerges in which Peter Jaitz also seems to observe his characters and their world, without controlling them.

(Thomas Mang, In: SR Online, 2009)


Rimini sketches two parallel narrative threads, both of them revolving around a young man who has become dysfunctional: in one Alex, who leaves a professional meeting without giving any reasons and then drifts through Vienna; and in the other Hans, a suspended detective who sleeps in his car and acts out a detective’s life. One of the two refuses to remain in his assigned place, the other stubbornly hangs on to a role that has become empty.

(Michael Loebenstein)