It seems fair to start this review with a quote from Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. who in one of his texts wrote: “What is youth? A dream. What is love? The content of the dream ". This sentence, perhaps meaningless for many, seems to us instead the perfect summary of another of the films of the ghost edition of Cannes 2020 arrived in the halls of Rome Film Festival. This time it's the turn of Another Round (original Danish title, Pressure), the new film by one of the most popular directors on the European scene, Thomas Vitenberg, world-renowned author and co-founder together with Lars Von Trier of the Dogma 95 artistic movement.
Life's pleasures
According to one theory, one should be born with a small amount of alcohol in the blood, so that the mild state of euphoria and altered senses can help us open our minds, remain optimistic and inspire creativity. Martin (Mads Mikkelsen), Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), Peter (Lars Ranthe) and Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) all four work as high school teachers and have lost, some more and some less, the passion for their profession and for life . Fascinated by this theory, they decide to conduct an experiment which consists in maintaining a moderate but constant level of alcoholic intoxication throughout the day. The results come almost immediately and are initially positive: the classes visibly improve their performance and the four friends rediscover a certain joy of life and lost stimuli.
However, when, caught by enthusiasm, the group decides to increase the doses of alcohol per day, the experiment will begin to present unpleasant and dangerous side effects for themselves and for others. The director of Festen - Festa in Famiglia (1998) and Il Sospetto (2014) - collaborates again with Mads Mikkelsen for an unusual buddy comedy on alcohol halfway between Via da Las Vegas (1995) and La Grande Abbuffata (1973) by Marco Ferreri. The film's controversial keystone (the sometimes inspiring and therapeutic quality of alcohol) hides a delicate story of friendship, love and joie de vivre, superbly played by the four protagonists and filmed intimately (according to the rules of Dogma) with a machine digital hand.
Another Round gracefully passes through multiple registers: from a buddy comedy style The Hangover to a Nordic-style drama at times existentialist, framed in a subtle art movie format. Vitenberg director cites the positive qualities of spirits (he is keen to specify, other than alcohol and the origin of the term inspiration), but makes clear the fundamental need for moderation, citing the culturally relevant aspect that drinking has in Danish society and ease with which the passion for drinking can turn into obsessive addiction and alcoholism. Among the numerous quotes to Kierkegaard that dot the film, however, the true meaning of this story is hidden: the rediscovery of that strange adventure that is life, of knowing how to live beyond the fear of failure or expectations for the future, of a joy of being that does not have and must not have age. Another Round is a delicate celebration of being in the world, the joy of small things and the elusive beauty of living. A party that (why not?) Can be accompanied by a good drink. To drink, of course, in company.
