Film: “Rock’n Roll Ringo”: Always a solid druff

Just two years ago, director Dominik Galizia achieved a surprise success with his small film “Heiko’s World”, which was financed without a large budget through crowdfunding and without film funding. In this gem among the Berlin films, Martin Rohde played the eponymous Heiko, who wanders around Wedding corner bars without any major (life) plan and tries to make some money by playing darts. What was surprising was the nonchalance with which the film subverted all the usual conventions of social realism and came across with a casual calmness that is rather rare in German films.

Galizia has now arrived in the German film funding system. However, this didn’t hurt his new film “Rock’n’Roll Ringo”, as you can see with relief, quite the opposite. Everything is now a little bigger and more elaborate, but the unique characters that Galizia conjures up on the screen have remained.

Obviously, you don’t always have to go through the usual institutions to make exciting cinema.

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Instead of in the rough and uncouth Wedding, this time we are in the Ruhr area, where the people are very similar. Where else than in Pott (and in Wedding) can you admire real mullets and their wearers? Martin Rohde also fits effortlessly into this milieu. He plays 33-year-old Ringo Fleisch, who stumbles through life with a natural friendliness and almost childlike naivety, just as haphazardly and stoically as his Heiko from “Heiko’s World.”

He has just lost his job as a scaffolder due to his own stupidity, which he only challenges because his vacation with his deaf daughter Mia (Tuba Seese) is now in question. He had promised the twelve-year-old, who lives with her mother, a boat trip on the North Sea. Money is needed, and so Ringo starts off at the fair as a ticket collector on the roller coaster. The film was shot at the Cranger Kirmes in Herne, the largest folk festival in North Rhine-Westphalia, where over 500 showmen set up their rides, stands and stalls.

Fränkie, the boss of the neighboring “Fight Club,” soon sets his eyes on him and persuades Ringo to join him as a fairground boxer. He attracts people with quick money and a certain star appeal in the local scene. Ringo Fleisch becomes “Rock’n’Roll Ringo”.

At this point something definitely needs to be said about the actors. In addition to Martin Rohde, who himself is actually only a casual acting amateur, some of the main and many supporting characters in the film are amateur actors. It’s almost a feat how Galizia manages to lead them so well that you don’t notice anything amateurish about their playing, and yet keep them as authentic and real as possible. No professional actor would probably have the street credibility to play Fränkie like Charly Schultz does, himself a showman and boxing legend who has been on the country’s fairgrounds with the “Fight Club” for over three decades.

The principle of his business is simple: every evening the boxers that Fränkie has taken into his “family” present themselves to the audience. Anyone who is at least 18 years old and sober can challenge a pugilist (female boxers are also included). If the challenger wins, he or she collects a pre-announced reward. The boxing match is then the real show.

Showmen, formerly also known as traveling people, always embodied the foreign and the intrusion of the exotic into the bourgeois world. The mixture of “family” and freedom and the isolation of the milieu exerted and continue to exert a fascination on outsiders, even if showmen today have long since developed from traveling folk into medium-sized entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, the attraction of the fair as a place of work and leisure for marginalized people, those who have failed and people who otherwise don’t have many opportunities in middle-class society is still great.

This is where “Rock’n’Roll Ringo” draws its considerable show value. The fair as a playground for outsiders and outlaws – does that remind you of something? Sure, we’re dealing with a modern Ruhrpott Western here. In the classic Western, the stylistic element is the good, sometimes naive-seeming but defensive hero opposite his counterpart, the unscrupulous villain. There is usually a woman between the actors over whom a fight takes place. The setting is the fort or the small town with a saloon, whiskey and card games. The fair as a small world in itself, with its own rules and even its own pastor, fully serves the Western cliché. In addition, Galizia used the comparatively generous budget to shoot in widescreen on analogue 35mm film instead of using a digital camera. This gives the film its very own aesthetic and a brilliance and depth of colors that not coincidentally make it look like a classic spaghetti western.

Ringo has actually had some success as a boxer, but that doesn’t exactly make him any friends in the scene. When Jenny (Larissa Sirah Herden), the bumper car operator’s sister, shows interest in him, he unintentionally goes astray with her into the criminal milieu, and finally beats a challenger into a coma in the “Fight Club”, he has finally decided turned the entire local demimonde against him. Like in a western, everything is heading towards the final duel. Unfortunately, as announced, his daughter is standing at the train station waiting to be picked up to go on vacation together. Without knowing how and why it is happening to him, Ringo is caught between all fronts.

Now one could complain that the last half hour and the finale are badly constructed and not very plausible. But that doesn’t diminish the sensual pleasure in any way; you’re happy to follow Galizia’s passion for fiction and great cinema. His professional experience from advertising films and music videos is clearly noticeable and visible in »Rock’n’Roll Ringo«.

Rapid camera movements, a quick montage and the driving soundtrack bring considerable momentum to the not at all sedate events and testify to Galizia’s craftsmanship. The director never studied film, but was always a practical man who began his career after school as a stunt choreographer at Disneyland Paris and later approached film as a side entry.

It would certainly be daring to claim that Galizia’s unconventional approach, the down-to-earth nature and the closeness to life of his characters are due to the fact that he has not seen a film school from the inside and is therefore uneducated. Obviously, you don’t always have to go through the usual institutions to make exciting cinema.

»Rock’n’Roll Ringo«: Germany 2024. Director: Dominik Galizia. With: Martin Rohde, Larissa Sirah Herden, Erwin Leder. 101 minutes, start: 5.9.

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