The Loneliest Man in Town

Austrian directing duo Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel are known for blurring – even challenging – the boundary between documentary and fiction. In The Loneliest Man in Town, they pluck their film’s protagonist from real life and into a scripted setting, still largely based on his own history.

Alois Koch performs the blues under the stage name Al Cook. Going through solitary rituals on Christmas Eve, the lights are suddenly switched off in his apartment. The audience learns that he is quite literally the last man standing in the face of a holding company’s intent to tear down the building. The musician does not want to leave this place that holds all of his memories.

There is something incredibly poignant in discovering the life Cook has carved out for himself through Covi and Frimmel’s meditative lens. The portrayal is marked by warmth and compassion throughout, without shying away from depicting his solitude, resulting in a deeply felt melancholy. The America he sings and dreams of, never having been there, has long ceased to exist in our reality – if it ever did. But like the artist, who has barely left the 1960s when he first listened to and modelled himself after Elvis Presley, the film exists in a timeline of its own. Housing displacement and restaurant closures only quiet signs signifying Vienna’s gentrification.

At one point, Al Cook speaks of a recurring nightmare, in which a piano only has white keys. It comes from a place of not being able to play the instrument anymore, since he cannot read sheet music, but it resonates with viewers in particular as a reflection on the disappearance of truly original artists such as himself.

In its calm, unassuming way The Loneliest Man in Town embodies a profound empathy, offering not only a character study of one man’s unique experience, but also a subtly evocative contemplation of the universal longing for connection.

Selina Sondermann

The Loneliest Man in Town does not have a release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Berlin Film Festival coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Berlin Film Festival website here.