23 April,2021 07:00 AM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
A still from Another Round
Baffles me a bit that a film, essentially a director's medium, must fetch for itself an Oscar nomination for Best Director (along with Best International Film), but not make the cut for a Best Picture nom itself, which is anyway a much longer list! That's the curious case with Another Round.
But Oscars are judgments held year on year, while a devastatingly meditative film, studying the human condition, establishing and discarding certain precious truths, such as this, lasts forever. What's it essentially a meditation on by the way? Booze therapy, if you may!
Yup, Another Round is a rare film on alcohol. Not alcoholism - that so many in the past have been; even mildly romanticising self-destruction in the process. What's the difference between two?
Well, to sort of quote the movie itself, you booze, when you have to, and that makes you a drinker. With alcoholism, you have no choice. Also, one is a symptom; the other, a consequent disease.
If all this is seeming too instructional to you, when all you're in the mood for is a highly entertaining movie, this Danish drama is a dialectical take, for sure. But at no point is it obviously preachy, or didactic. It's genuinely engaging all along.
Although the four lead characters here are all teachers, in a high school, going about their day's deathly routine - taking classes in psychology, sports and music, respectively. In the spotlight is the phenomenally genteel, oozing understated emotions in every scene, Mads Mikkelsen, the star of the show all right. His character teaches history.
On the point of schools though, let me just nitpick a little, because it bothers me sometimes, with movies set in classrooms. Often the point at which a scene switches a lecture, with the teacher before students, the knowledge being imparted is so rudimentary; you wonder if the kids (in 12th grade) really learn much otherwise. For instance (here), "Psychology is the study of psychological processes," or "industrial revolution is the basis of..."
But let me not distract you from the fullness of this film that my random observation has absolutely no bearing on. It is in fact based on Norwegian philosopher/psychiatrist Finn Skarderud's studied hypothesis that humans are born with a blood-alcohol level 0.05 per cent less than optimal.
And maintaining those normal alcohol levels in the body is in fact desirable for social and professional performance. The four middle-aged men in this movie decide to test this theory upon themselves. How?
By drinking only during the day (before 8 pm), and never during weekends - like Ernest Hemingway did (apparently). And staying at the "exact point of being neither drunk nor sober", which is when pianist Klaus Heerfordt played his instrument to perfection! The idea is to get to "ignition point", rather than shit-faced, so to say.
What are the results? Should be remarkable! For, does it not tally with the experience of any drinker? Why do millions repeatedly gravitate to the substance (initially, or at all), if not for an incontestable truth that it makes most of us, socially, a better/fun version of ourselves? Subsequent levels of âbad behaviour' are of course a matter of intake, isn't it? Dependence being a concern, but that goes without saying. Or does it?
To drill his opening argument still, in an inimitable way that only a master-director like Thomas Vinterberg is capable of - he cheekily segues into archive shots of world leaders like Yeltsin, Merkel, Clinton, Johnson, Nixon and others, to give you a sense of what they're like, when tipsy at work! Churchill is lorded as the ultimate king of good times!
This isn't a polemic/documentary though. It plays on you on too many levels, to be one. From the professional - surveying a sub-culture of high-school teacher life; surrounded by hope and expectations from the young. It's not like you can either be a nervous bloke, or a drunken wreck at teaching, which involves critical feedback. There are careers/futures on the line. There is then the personal - diving deep into mid-life ennui, and family life in a sleepy, Danish university-town.
Another Round is in equal parts an entirely real, slightly uplifting and mildly depressing drama, from Vinterberg - the Daddy (along with fellow Dane, Lars von Trier) of the Dogme 95 film/digital movement, that aims to project cinema shorn of all artifice (excessive camerawork, edit wizardry, or the existence of background score, in the first place!).
That said, I guess you can specifically recommend a film, knowing a fan of, say, a particular genre/director/actor etc. This is a movie, foremost (if not entirely) for drinkers. They'll get involved in it in a manner that teetotallers may not care for as much.
Is that possibly why the Academy may not have seen the work as profound/universal enough, but expressive/individualistic in its own right for the director to be rewarded/acknowledged for it? Who cares; either way, many cheers to this, seriously!
