‘The Loneliest Man in Town’ Berlinale Review: Empty Building Blues
An aging Austrian bluesman, now the last tenant in his building, stubbornly resists the developers trying to force him out—finding unlikely allies along the way.
Alois Koch—aka Al Cook—is a blues and rockabilly singer-guitarist who once flirted with the idea of becoming Austria’s answer to Elvis Presley. Back in the day he cut a few records and chased that dream with conviction. It didn’t quite pan out. Now pushing 80, he still listens to the blues with near-religious devotion on carefully curated vinyl, strums his guitar, sings in bars, and spends most of his time alone. But this isn’t—or not only—a matter of personal isolation. Alois is literally alone: he’s the last remaining tenant in the building he calls home.
That double solitude—the more intimate kind reveals itself gradually—turns him into the last man standing from a forgotten era. Not just musically, but in terms of a way of living that’s fast disappearing. The building has been bought by an investment group that has methodically bought out the other residents, one by one. Alois, however, refuses to budge. His apartment is his world, his life, everything. A bit like the character played by Sonia Braga in Aquarius, he has no intention of giving in to pressure from the new owners—even when they cut off his electricity at Christmas. Or the water. Or send in a goon to make his life miserable with a “sign here or I’ll drive you insane” routine.
The Loneliest Man in Town is a melancholic comedy by the duo behind La Pivellina, whose work has increasingly drifted toward fiction. While their films still lean on real-life personalities, the worlds they construct now seem to incorporate more and more scripted elements. Here, the focus is on Alois’s quiet attempts to survive the onslaught of new ownership—along with the new (and old) friends he meets or reconnects with along the way in his noble, if chaotic, resistance.
Working in a bone-dry comedic register—with a central character and musical sensibility that recall the cinema of Aki Kaurismäki—Covi and Frimmel sketch a portrait of an era in transition, one that affects not just a city but everything happening inside it. Vienna, comparatively speaking, still prides itself on preserving its traditions, architectural ones included. But that’s hardly true across all districts, and real estate speculation and gentrification are everywhere. Alois—along with his vinyl collection and the plaintive voices of blues greats—becomes a kind of cultural resistance.
A widower with few viable escape routes from mounting harassment, Alois soon finds that even the bar he frequents—his home away from home—shuts down, completing the metaphor of a neighborhood in flux and its impact on these “original inhabitants.” Maybe the answer is to sell everything and finally head to the cradle of the blues, to encounter firsthand the music that’s obsessed him since youth. Or maybe it will emerge from elsewhere, when necessity summons ghosts long thought forgotten.
How much of The Loneliest Man in Town is real and how much is fiction is beside the point. What matters is its portrait of the melancholy brought on by time’s passage and fading customs; the resilience of those who still believe in certain codes; and the surprising second—and even third—chances that life sometimes opens up when least expected. The old line about crisis being an opportunity fits this film perfectly. Especially if it comes with a guitar in hand and the voice of Robert Johnson in the background.
