Austria: Film »Rickerl«: cigarettes for breakfast

For ten years, David Öllerer, alias Voodoo Jürgens, had a difficult time in life. He broke off his apprenticeship as a confectioner at a renowned court sugar bakery, wrote a song about it (“Sugar Baker”) and worked as a cemetery gardener. “No stress and always in the fresh air,” is how the musician self-deprecatingly describes his job at the time in an interview. The gravedigger song “Heite gross ma Tote aus” gave Voodoo Jürgens his breakthrough in 2016 on the Vienna radio station FM4.

Adrian Goiginger’s “Rickerl – Music is at most a hobby” is not a biopic, but a homage to the Viennese, its “Beisln” (pubs, dive bars) and “Tschocherln” (drinking rooms) and Austropop. Rickerl’s name comes from Voodoo Jürgens’ song “Gitti”. But this Rickerl has nothing to do with Gitti’s “Suburban Casanova”, the director rather draws parallels to Öllerer’s, i.e. Voodo Jürgens’ life and paints the picture of a primal artist who lets himself drift through the days with his music.

Like the artist himself, Erich “Rickerl” Bohacek (Voodoo Jürgens) also works in a cemetery. He was just singing about the morbid in the house of the dead with “Weh au Weh” (from the debut album: “Ansa Woar”) when a skull rolled at his feet. To the musician’s astonishment, having polished a dead man’s skull with chlorine is considered “desecration of the dead,” and so Rickerl receives immediate dismissal. That’s why he can forget about the swipe for the employment office and all the graveyard jobs.

The bon vivant washes down his anger with alcohol. The fact that his manager thinks it’s a shame that Rickerl has ruined his job in the cemetery (“the morbid thing, gravestones, dead people, people like that”) is again a kind of gallows humor that suits the musician over 30 face is standing. In his guitar case, Rickerl collects all the song lyrics on scrap sheets; there are no recordings. The singer is a slob out of time who, together with his pub family – all of whom are older than him – praise “the good old days”. He doesn’t own a smartphone; he uses a cassette recorder to record music.

Since Rickerl is more at home in bars than in his apartment, he takes his six-year-old son Dominik (Ben Winkler) with him to the smoky pub. For the bright Dominik, his dad, whom he sees every two weeks, is an adventurer and he brags about him at school. Rickerl messes up a lot when dealing with his son. When the employment office puts him in an erotic shop, he simply takes his six-year-old son with him on Dad’s Day. It doesn’t help that he calls the dildo a “massage stick” and Dominik is only allowed to see the beginning of the porn. His ex Viki (Agnes Hausmann) made the jump with a model house, a bourgeois friend and an elite school for Dominik.

Adrian Goiginger already addressed a difficult family constellation in his debut work “The Best of All Worlds” (2017). The director’s mother was a drug addict. When he was a child, she showed him an ideal world. In “The Fox” (2022), Goiginger used his grandfather’s story to explore whether strokes of fate can be inherited; in “Rickerl” a family man has to break away from his alcoholic and gambling addicted father (Rudi Larsen) and take responsibility. In real life, Öllerer’s father was in prison, and he sings about it in the song “Tulln.”

Rickerl is a bit like Öllerer in an alternative life. Rickerl also meets a lady on the radio and has a son, not a daughter. Both sing in pubs, both smoke and drink. You can practically smell the smoke, which was often amplified by smoke machines. The fact that »Rickerl« moves through the plot using Voodoo Jürgens’ songs, all taken from life, fits in well with this.

The soundtrack is released as a limited »Rickerl« EP with four Voodoo Jürgens songs recorded specifically for the film in an edition of 500 – they were all gone after just two weeks. Musically, the bands used in the film read like a retro trip: Wolfgang Ambros, Hans Orsolics, Heinrich Walcher and the members of STS were all born in the mid-40s and early 50s. “Yes, so sans, the Austrians, always in the past, always backwards,” Rickerl remarks and speaks – without realizing it – about himself. But when he speaks with his guitar with a lot of heart and mind about the homeless, loneliness and If love muses in Viennese, then yesterday becomes today and the pub where he performs becomes the center of his small, subtle world.

“Rickerl – Music is at most a hobby”: Germany, Austria 2023. Director and book: Adrian Goiginger. With: Voodoo Jürgens, Ben Winkler, Agnes Hausmann. 104 minutes, start: February 1st.