Druk
Thomas Vinterberg (2020)
Soon after One Night in Miami at the London Film Festival came Thomas Vinterberg’s latest, which he co-wrote with his regular collaborator, Tobias Lindholm. This is another film about four men, played by four good actors, but the similarities end there. I hated Another Round. As I started to write this note, I read that it had been named the Festival’s Best Film. This year, the award was voted for by audiences – the latest, albeit a minor, instance of democracy getting a bad name[1].
The main characters are friends and members of staff at a Danish secondary school. Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) teaches history and Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) psychology. Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen) is in charge of games and Peter (Lars Ranthe) the school choir. The first two have wives and children, the latter two neither. The foursome meets in a restaurant to celebrate Nikolaj’s fortieth birthday. All except Martin, who’s driving, are enjoying the wine; the conversation, too, turns to drink. Nikolaj tells the others about a theory propounded by Finn Skårderud, a (real) Norwegian psychologist. According to Skårderud (according to Nikolaj), human beings are born with a blood alcohol level that is 0.05% too low: sustained modest alcohol consumption therefore improves human performance all round – makes you more confident, relaxed and daring. The men decide to test the theory. Martin joins the others in swilling wine. It’s a declaration of intent.
We already know things aren’t going well for Martin either at work or at home. A student asks how Martin can expect the class to pass their forthcoming university entrance exams when their teacher’s attitude is so ‘indifferent’. Screen moments later, the school head (Susse Wold) informs Martin that the pupils have demanded an urgent meeting. When he arrives at it, the kids are accompanied by their parents, who also disparage Martin’s teaching. At home, conversations with his two adolescent sons are glumly laconic. Their mother Anika (Maria Bonnevie) no longer recognises in her husband the vital man she married. Things aren’t good in the bedroom, even when Anika isn’t working night shifts (as a nurse?). We see next to nothing of Nikolaj’s performance in the classroom; we do see that this vaguely pompous fellow, who means to turn the results of the alcohol experiment into an academic paper, does as he’s told by his wife. They have three young kids, one a regular bed-wetter. Only two scenes take place in Tommy’s home, which he shares with his elderly, ailing dog. This animal has different urinary problems: his master has to help him to pee. Peter’s domestic life is conspicuous by its complete absence from the film.
The drinking regime is soon paying dividends, especially for Martin. His mildly inebriated lectures about great tipplers of the twentieth century – Churchill, Ernest Hemingway – go down a storm with his previously disgruntled class. Martin takes his wife and kids away on a spur-of-the-moment camping weekend. It’s the first family holiday they’ve had in ages; sex in the tent is great for him and for Anika. In compensation for the negligible coverage of their lives outside work, each of Tommy and Peter is assigned a particular schoolkid and helps him to overcome his inadequacies. The despised, bespectacled runt of a junior football team, with the help of a swig from Tommy’s bottle of ‘water’, starts scoring goals. Sebastian (Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt), an older boy, fears he’ll go to pieces in his forthcoming viva. Peter recommends Dutch courage.
As the principals imbibe, the screen flashes up numbers that indicate the rising blood alcohol level. The film opens with a quote from Kierkegaard (also, eventually, the subject of Sebastian’s viva: suitably fortified, he passes with flying colours). Further references to Skårderud’s theories help maintain the film’s archly intelligent surface. But Another Round depends – like any film that means to mine this subject for comedy – on the hilarity of men behaving badly when they’re sloshed. (The hilarity includes not just legless collapse(s) but also Nikolaj, instead of his little boy, pissing in the bed.) Until, that is, things go too far. Martin and Anika’s second honeymoon period is short-lived: a showdown between them precedes a marital break-up. Following a spectacularly blotto appearance at a school staff meeting, Tommy gets fired or suspended – or, at any rate, stops going to work, starts going emotionally downhill.
The screening I attended in NFT1 included a short introduction, a recording of BFI’s Sarah Lutton in Zoom conversation with Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm. The film’s Danish title translates simply as ‘Drinking’; Vinterberg explained that he and Lindholm originally had in mind a ‘celebration’ of alcohol but felt they also needed to suggest the price that can be paid for it. Both joked about being middle-aged men wondering what life’s about and where it’s disappearing to, and their consequent need for alcohol relief. Lindholm pointed out that his children and a full diary of meetings make for a very busy, stressful routine: your heart bleeds for this father of three and internationally successful film-maker. (In addition to writing with Vinterberg, Lindholm has directed A Hijacking (2012) and A War (2015).) To be fair to both men, their interview was an accurate predictor of the tone of the film to follow, and its blithely slapdash script.
All four main players have appeared in Vinterberg films before but the director enjoyed one of his biggest successes with The Hunt (2012), starring Mads Mikkelsen, and Another Round is largely about Mikkelsen’s character. As a result, Thomas Bo Larsen and Lars Ranthe, excellent actors both, are wasted in more ways than one; and Martin’s dominance in the story weakens it as an illustration of male midlife crises. Beyond a passing suggestion that Peter can’t get a girlfriend, there’s little to explain why he and Tommy need to drown their sorrows. Anika, when she chucks Martin out, complains that, ‘Everyone in this country drinks like maniacs’. If she’s right (on the evidence of the film she seems to be), it’s hard to see the friends’ misguided experiment as a function of the male menopause. It’s more a bizarre variation on a Danish national sport.
Vinterberg’s description of the film as essentially a paean to drinking, tempered by acknowledgement that you can overdo it, is reflected in the climax to Another Round. Tommy, on the point of euthanising his old dog, decides to take his own life, too. It’s a thoroughly perfunctory tragedy. There’s a funeral service, with the other men as pallbearers and ‘Specs’, the kid Tommy helped score goals, leading a graveside tribute. Martin, Nikolaj and Peter go for a meal in memory of their pal before joining in the boozy celebrations of the graduating school class. (No one actually says, ‘It’s what Tommy would have wanted’, but that’s the message.) The happy endings for his mates – Anika decides she misses Martin, Peter has it off with the pottery teacher – are as mechanically unconvincing as Tommy’s death.
The film opens as well as closes with drunken student revelry. Several reviews of Another Round have suggested the men are trying to recapture the distant, devil-may-care innocence of youth. In reality, aren’t those who teach teenagers for a living less likely than most to fall prey to such dopey nostalgia? They’re certainly less well placed to ignore youngsters’ growing pains. (It may bed different for movie directors.) Besides, once Vinterberg has shown Martin’s class’s earnest insistence that he sets them up for good exam grades, it’s impossible to see them as carefree, let alone believe their enthusiasm for his Churchill-Hemingway diversions. The way the school runs is ridiculous. The head never asks Martin what happened in the meeting with his dissatisfied pupils, none of whose parents seems to have complained to her direct. No one ever comments on the smell of drink on Martin’s breath or anyone else’s.
The film’s few pleasures are minor and peripheral. A montage of famous politicians of the world either drinking or appearing to be drunk (Boris Yeltsin stars) makes for a brief amusing interlude. Peter’s choir makes a very nice sound, even if Vinterberg means the patriotic songs they sing to be ironic. Early on, in the pivotal restaurant scene, we learn that Martin once took jazz ballet classes. This immediately sounds like the kind of surprising detail that’s going to get a payoff, and so it does. Mads Mikkelsen performs a solo dance in the film’s euphoric closing sequence: you think, at least this will be worth watching but it’s oddly underwhelming. Maybe not oddly, though. It doesn’t help that Mikkelsen has been doing a virtual solo throughout Another Round.
14 October 2020
[1] It should be said that the competition was restricted to LFF offerings available online. The handful of high-profile films that screened only in cinemas – Ammonite, Mangrove, Nomadland, One Night in Miami – were ineligible.
