What if there were a magical elixir you could drink that would make all your troubles disappear? In the acclaimed Danish tragicomedy Another Round, that's the dream tempting Martin, Mads Mikkelsen's (Hannibal, Casino Royale) high-school history teacher, as he stares down the barrel of middle age.
Many men have been transformed on-screen by miracle formulas — from Jerry Lewis discovering his slick alter ego in The Nutty Professor to Cary Grant in Monkey Business, suddenly skittering about town with Marilyn Monroe on his arm.
But writer-director Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt) opts for something less fantastical, and grounded in reality, asking if a far more mundane potion — alcohol — can reignite the spark of youth.
When we first see Martin (Mikkelsen), he is dressed in a muted flannel shirt, moving through the routine of his life in Copenhagen in a dithering daze. At home, his two sons barely raise their eyes when he passes by. "Have I become boring?" he asks his wife Anika (Maria Bonnevie), who squirms in response.
He is only shaken from his stupor when his students — whose zeal contrasts against his own sorry gloom — go so far as to stage an intervention, afraid they'll fail their final-year exams.
Afterwards, Martin goes out to dinner with three teacher buddies (played by Vinterberg favourites: The Celebration's Thomas Bo Larsen and The Commune's Magnus Millang and Lars Ranthe). In a touching scene that highlights the director's eye for group dynamics, the friends rally to Martin's side — commiserating with stories about their own existential slumps — while he breaks down and weeps into his caviar.
But it's the idea from real-world Norwegian psychiatrist and Olympics committee member Finn Skarderud that really sticks: humans are born with a blood alcohol level 0.05 percent too low, he argues; after a couple of drinks, we're braver, more creative — more truly ourselves.
The four decide to secretly test out the theory, to see if day drinking will improve their professional and private lives. Because this is science — or so they tell themselves — they set rules: no booze after 8pm, or on weekends.
Let the games begin.
A box-office sensation in Denmark and a big winner at the European Film Awards, Another Round could be set up as another of Vinterberg's bitter middle-class critiques — such as The Hunt, in which Mikkelsen plays a kindergarten teacher wrongly accused of abusing a child, or The Celebration (his second feature, and a highpoint in the Dogme 95 movement), which sees a family reunion flirt with patricide.
Instead, Vinterberg and co-writer Tobias Lindholm (Borgen; A Hijacking) skewer expectations.
Without shying from the grimmer side of the experiment, the film is lifted by something effervescent — namely Mikkelsen's performance of a man reborn.
Dialled way down in the opening, the Danish actor's smouldering presence — on display in his Bond villain Le Chiffre through to his Rihanna video clip cameo — returns when Martin starts swigging vodka on the sly before class.
Gaining confidence, he dazzles his students with lively lessons — including a roll call of history's star alcoholics, like Churchill and Ulysses S. Grant — and reconnects with his family. The lives of the other teachers start looking up, too.
It's around this point that the film switches gears, moving from serious drama to something radiant and rambunctious, closer to farce.
There are scenes of loose physical comedy as the liquor intake rises and motor functions decline: the men groove in the living room to The Meters' funk anthem Cissy Strut, then crash through a supermarket, gripping the freezer doors in a feeble attempt to stay upright.
The action is captured by cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grovlen (Shirley), whose nimble handheld camera adds to the film's easy charms.
Alarm bells clang when Martin staggers through the crowded school staff room, sipping on a thermos that doesn't contain coffee, and cartoonishly bounces face-first into a wall.
As to be expected with a film dealing with excess, the giddy sensation of freedom is quickly troubled by the threat of addiction and abuse, and characters start to slot a little more neatly into their allotted places in the script.
The uneasiness is heightened by the switching perspective between insiders and outsiders.
Martin's son Jonas (Magnus Sjorup) finds him passed out and bleeding on the neighbour's doorstep — one of several painful juxtapositions which makes us question what we've been seeing; can we trust Martin's sozzled recollections? Is he still in control?
Scenes slide from merry-making to cold sobriety; from the thrill of belonging, experienced with the gang, to the loneliness he feels while eating a bowl of cereal in the dark.
And yet even as the glitter of the drunken revelry dulls, Vinterberg manages to imbue the film with surprising, life-affirming warmth.
The director has attributed the authentic emotions on screen to the tragic circumstances surrounding the movie: his 19-year-old daughter Ida was killed in a car accident four days into production, and the film was shot at her school and cast with her friends. The result is dedicated to her memory.
Resisting clear-cut moral lessons, Another Round remains refreshingly open-ended. Some will find comfort in its embrace of chaos and unpredictability; others will be left chilled by the cycles of drinking and damage that the next generation appear doomed to repeat.
The film's kiss-off — a euphoric sequence that showcases Mikkelsen's background as an acrobat and dancer — sees Martin energetically launch himself skyward, ready to meet his fate.
LoadingAnother Round is in cinemas now.
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2021-02-12 00:22:00Z
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