Director: Adrian Golginger (Austria, Germany). Year of Release: 2023
A man is talking to his boss, who accuses him of disturbing the peace of the dead. He shouldn’t have borrowed that skull. Rickerl Bohacek has just lost another job – this time as a gravedigger. He visits the job centre where the worker assigned to him greets him with a familiar sigh. She reminds him that as he was sacked it will be 4 weeks before he can claim any benefits. He asks if they can’t just put up a little money on front while he works on his first album.
Rickerl is tall, lanky, with an unkempt beard. When the job centre woman tells him that he’s now on the black list of all graveyards in Vienna, he replies that you should always question the system to some degree. His flat is as disorganised as his life, and he makes Jeff Lebowski look a bit too neurotic. It’s not that he’s lazy, more that he genuinely doesn’t care for worldly things. Although it would be great if the Job Centre carried on paying his dole money.
Rickerl goes to pick up his son Dominik from his ex-girlfriend Viki. She’s now living with a rich German, Kurti, in the posh part of town. She is friendly with her ex – you can see how they could have been in a relationship. But she’s also frustrated with his lackadaiscal irresponsibility. When they were together, he used to stay out all night drinking with his friends while she was left looking after Dominik. It doesn’t seem that he has matured at all since then.
Dominik asks Rickerl to take him to the latest superhero film. His dad says maybe, but first they must visit Rickerl’s manager. The manager reminds Rickerl that he had presented an album’s worth of songs 3 years ago. Whatever happened to them? Rickerl mumbles that they still need some work. Nonetheless, the manager offers Rickerl a job, and promises to send him a WhatsApp message. But Rickerl’s Nokia phone is too old-school for anything as fancy as WhatsApp.
Rickerl’s friends in the pub – always there to drink a few rounds with him – are all a generation older, and look back nostalgically to the times when everything was better, before gentrification and stuff. They drink, play cards, and just enjoy each others’ company. One used to be a building worker, and tries to shock Dominik with tales of workplace accidents. Another worked for local radio, But none obviously works any more, and some may have never worked in the first place.
The Job Center calls Richerl in for a job at a sex shop. Rickerl prepares himself by drinking 2 quick glasses of schnapps, and presents himself as badly as possible in the job interview (think of Spud in Trainspotting). This doesn’t move the shop owner, who tells him that she knows that he’s only there to get the stamp which he can show the Job Centre that shows he turned up for the interview. But she needs someone who’s just like her seedy customers. Rickerl fits the part exactly.
Ricerl starts work, arriving a few hours late because he’s been camping with Dominik. He potters around whule Dominik watches a video of The love-crazed Dirndls from Tirol. Then he realises that he left his guitar at the improvised campsite so rushes off, with Dominik struggling to keep up. By the time that he arrives at the campsite, the guitar has already gone, and Dominik has got lost and been picked up by the police. Rickerl has lost his guitar, his son and his job on the same day,
Rickerl gets a one-off job playing a wedding party with a band of elderly musicians in a similar state to himself. They are to play Austropop and covers of the Beatles and the like – things that people will dance to. When the band encourage Rickerl to play an original composition, at first it foes down well, and couples seek each other to take to the dance floor. By the time the song is over, a fight has broken out, and the band must take freebies from the food counter in lieu of pay.
Richerl’s main worry is that he doesn’t end up like his father. Viki fears that that ship has already passed, and tries to ensure that the baton is not passed down to Dominik. Yet for all her righteous anger at the way in which Rickerl has treated her, the faint memory of love still flickers. In a scene in which they dance together, they stare into one another’s eyes with pure love. Viki doesn’t want her son to be like the man who messed her around for so long and for whom she still feels love.
The film ultimately stands and falls on the songs and performance of the singer Voodoo Jürgens, who seems to play Rickerl as an exaggerated version of his own laid back personality. Rickerl sings about pubs, and the people who drink in them. About people who wake up on the street next to a pool of sick. He sings in a Viennese accent so thick that this film had to have German subtitles. And the songs are very good, an aural version of Heinrich Zille’s sketches of everyday life.
Some critics have commented that Rickerl, the film, and Jürgens’ songs, are unpolitical. Well, yes and no. Rickerl is (un)political in the way that the Good Soldier Švejk of Jaroslav Hašek and Berthold Brecht is (un)political. He is a ne’erdowell, stumbling from one minijob to another. His fight against the system is carried out by refusing to accept its rules. This is no help to the long suffering Viki or Job Centre workers, but it is in a way, a strike against the system.
I’ve spent this review trying to find synonyms for feckless, but there really is no better word to describe Rickerl. But his lack of ambition is exemplary. In a world where everyone is expected to succeed at the expense of everyone else, his only care is for the scribbled handwritten lyrics which he keeps in his guitar case. He even donates his beloved guitar to a homeless man who he vaguely knows when he witnesses the joy with which the old man plays.
Rickerl does not call for an uprising against an inhumane system, but his survival is an affront to its homogeneity. You guess he would be a good friend but a terrible partner. You fully understand why Niki can no longer live with him, despite the lingering attraction, but we share his visible announcement when he finds out that she is going to marry the German Kurti – less because he’s losing Niki and more because once she rejected marriage as part of a bourgeois lifestyle.
Rickert . Musik is meistens a Hobby is a slacker film, but here the slackers are not pampered middle class kids, but someone who really has little stake in the system. It is all the better, and funnier, for that. And most of the songs are pretty good too.
CinePhil 