It’s taken a while for cinephiles (including this writer) to catch up with the Vienna-based filmmaking duo of Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel. Their profile was raised a bit on these shores in 2023 when their most recent feature, Vera, got a small commercial release. That film, about the middle-aged daughter of Italian actor Giuliano Gemma, played a bit like a Dardennes version of a Real Housewives episode, as it followed its subject through the remnants of a charmed life that nevertheless led to bitterness and dissatisfaction. A faded diva down on her luck, Vera would be an easy target for lesser filmmakers to mock. But Covi and Frimmel’s great talent is their ability to convey constant respect and curiosity about their chosen subject, looking past the surface affectations to locate Vera’s essential humanity.
Like all their films, Vera was a docu-fiction that the pair built around a real person whose everyday persona involved some degree of performance. They have adjusted the formula a bit with their latest film, since its subject, Alois Koch/Al Cook, is a quiet man very unlike the flamboyant Vera. But like her, Al is a performer whose time in the spotlight is largely over. This is the story of an elderly Viennese bluesman whose life is upended when a development company buys his building and evicts him. At first, The Loneliest Man in Town seems like a fairly predictable David-and-Goliath story about gentrification, along the lines of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius. But Al is a practical man, and when he realizes he has no choice but to leave, the story takes on a somewhat wider scope.
It seems nearly impossible to watch The Loneliest Man in Town and not think about the films of Aki Kaurismäki. After all, this is an urban tale of a man who has devoted his life to blues and rockabilly music, wears his hair in a nostalgic pompadour, and has curated a private existence that is fundamentally out of step with contemporary concerns. Add to this Covi and Frimmel’s boxy treatment of interiors and generally locked-down camerawork, and Loneliest Man seems like a kind of meta-commentary on Kaurismäki and his lovable losers. The thing is, Kaurismäki’s films are defined by community, the way that social problems can be fixed through an almost instinctual tendency toward utopian thinking. Al, however, is stuck in the very real world.
Cook’s specific relationship to the Delta blues is also a sort of sidelong riff on Kaurismäki, who, like Wim Wenders, is fascinated with American pop culture, especially when it’s filtered through European sensibilities. Loneliest Man finds Cook not only in the twilight of his life, but at a moment of crisis and finality. He is literally the last man remaining in his apartment building, and the owners’ thugs force him out by turning off his electricity and water, breaking into his flat, and threatening physical violence. Cook neither beats them nor joins them, deciding instead to sell his belongings and finally take a trip to America, a pilgrimage to Mississippi where he probably always belonged.
This is interesting for a few reasons. First, Covi and Frimmel seem to understand that the “America” Cook means to seek out is long gone. When he tells people he’s done with Vienna and means to emigrate, they look at him askance. Who’d go live in America now? But Cook is a living embodiment of 20th-century culture and values, with his Dobro, his old Super 8 and VHS recordings of his blues performances, piles and piles of vinyl albums and CDs, framed memorabilia, and a modest home recording studio. All the cultural artifacts that the U.S. is so desperate to discard in favor of fast capital and AI slop, Cook holds onto, curates, and protects. So in a way, Cook has the potential to bring our own culture back to us. We took it for granted, but for him, it was everything.
Published as part of NYFF 2026 — Dispatch 6.
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