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SAN SEBASTIÁN 2020 Competition

Review: Another Round

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- Thomas Vinterberg finds his funny bone again with an excellent concept movie in which getting drunk is a cure-all

Review: Another Round
Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang and Lars Ranthe in Another Round

Another Round is one of the finalists for the 2021 LUX Audience Award.

The concept of Thomas Vinterberg's Another Round [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
is so good that one hopes he was in the pub to celebrate with a drink when he or his recent go-to scriptwriter Tobias Lindholm (2016’s The Commune [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Thomas Vinterberg
film profile
]
, 2013’s The Hunt [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Thomas Vinterberg
interview: Thomas Vinterberg
film profile
]
and 2010’s Submarino [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Thomas Vinterberg
film profile
]
) came up with it. Or maybe it was while he was on a great night out with the lads that Vinterberg decided to make a film inspired by Norwegian psychologist Finn Skårderud's obscure theory that man is born with a 0.05% blood-alcohol-level shortfall. Then the question becomes: what would happen to your well-being if you tried to keep yourself inebriated to this perfect level? Would man be happier? (The wives and girlfriends are mostly making demands at home, which is where the movie does wet its bed somewhat.) Who could resist such a great pitch, which could have been written on the back of a cigarette packet? Not Cannes, where Another Round received the Official Selection label, nor the Toronto Film Festival, where it was also part of the Official Selection, nor the San Sebastián Film Festival, where the film has now had its physical world premiere, in competition.

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It only seems right that once you come up with such a concept, it's then time to get the old band together. And what a champagne moment it is seeing Vinterberg alumni Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang and Lars Ranthe in the same movie. They play high-school teachers in the midst of a mid-life crisis, who are looking to get their mojo back both at home and at work, and what better way than alcohol? (The montage of politicians slurring and falling over answers that question in the real world, but this is the movies.) There is something so subversive about this idea that it's almost a shame to report that even in cinema, alcohol plays out as a cure for life's ills, in precisely the way one would suspect. There is a hangover eventually. Initially, it feels like Vinterberg is going to celebrate alcohol as an all-encompassing remedy in a way that would make Withnail and I ecstatic. One nervous schoolchild is even told to have a drink to cure his anxiety over exams – and it works a treat. Teaching history, Mikkelsen's Martin starts telling the kids that alcohol is what links great men of the past. The shift in approach has his pupils looking at him like he's Robin William's John Keating. Then comes waking up with a headache.

But Vinterberg is a smart director and knows better than to allow any movie of his to be governed by a single, drunken concept. He uses the drinking ruse to entice us in, before revealing that this picture has a more profound message about how, when life seems meaningless and boring, it's sometimes a result of our failure to be honest with ourselves. And it's this keg of the story that makes Another Round a tale that celebrates life’s highs and lows.

It's all helped through a stupendous performance by the drinker-in-chief: Mikkelsen's Martin. Working in his native tongue for the first time in ages, the thesp excels at playing someone in a massive rut, bored of teaching and with a marriage in the doldrums. The drinking works until it doesn't, but it gives him enough insight to understand that something has got to give. And it does so in a spectacular way. Will his life be any happier? Who knows, but at least inside, and outside, he's dancing.

Another Round is a Danish-Swedish-Dutch co-production staged by Zentropa Entertainments, Film i Väst, Zentropa International Sweden, Topkapi Films and Zentropa International Netherlands. Its international sales have been entrusted to TrustNordisk.

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