Another Round review : A vivid rendition of a booze-soaked midlife crisis

4/5

Never has adulthood been tackled more deftly as it is in Another Round. This Danish comedy-drama, directed by Thomas Vinterberg, is the tale of four high-school teachers who put the human body’s tolerance for alcohol to the test. What begins as a fun experiment soon takes a sombre turn, acting as a rude awakening for the group to realign their lives. Starring Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larson, Lars Ranthe, and Magnus Millang, Another Round is the vivid, and painfully accurate, rendition of a booze-soaked midlife crisis that often goes unrealised till one is forced to face it.

Right from the very beginning, the narrative makes it apparent that the drinking culture of Denmark is one of the key elements of the plot. A vibrant party scene featuring students in a drunken stupor cuts to the bland and unexciting life of Martin (Nikkelsen) whose students find him redundant as their history teacher. His personal life is no source of comfort either, for the distance between him and his wife is clear as day.

At Nikolaj’s (Millang) 40th birthday party, an abstaining Martin suddenly puts away a considerable amount of alcohol before tearfully revealing to his friends that he feels out of place and unmotivated. This gives Nikolaj, who teaches psychology at the school, an idea that on the surface is a typical teenager stunt but in reality has deeper implications. He tells Martin, Tommy (Larson) and Peter (Ranthe) about a Swedish psychologist who theorized that human beings are born with an inherently lowered blood alcohol content (BAC). Should a human find their BAC to be 0.5 per cent at all times through the day, they will be able to achieve their full potential after lowering their inhibitions and letting go of the weight that holds them back. Martin is silently grasping at straws in his life, finds this theory to be incredibly apt and decides to give it a try. And why shouldn’t he? His passion for jazz ballet cannot be roused even after his friends egg him on on multiple occasions, his wife is absent from the picture and his students want nothing more than to change their teacher.

The rest of the gang joins him in this experiment which is not frivolous in the least, for they have extremely strict rules - no drinking after 8pm and on the weekends. Gradually, the four find their performance at work to have drastically improved. Martin succeeds in making his class interesting and memorable in every lesson, Tommy is able to push his meekest football player to win a match, Peter finds himself connecting with his students, while Nikolaj carefully documents their reactions to constant levels of inebriation.

However, the looming threat of alcoholism starts to pervade into the life of the friends when they decide to further test their capacity of intoxication by binge drinking and then going about their days. Martin is visibly under the influence and his family starts to catch on to this fact. His neighbors finding him passed out on their front door does not help his cause. Subsequently, Nikolaj and Martin get into heated debates with their spouses, but the latter’s life is shattered when his wife Anika (Maria Bonnevie) admits to having cheated on him.

The narrative then changes its focus - it is no longer a celebration of soaking in pubs and testing the limits of how the human body reacts to increasing levels of alcohol. The consequences of endless pints and multiple rounds has crept into the lives of the four friends, but only Tommy seems to have developed a chronic alcohol addiction. He even shows up to the school completely out of his senses and is then observed by Martin every night over dinner, who tries to keep Tommy in check. Just as the students, who are now supremely fond of the four teachers, are graduating, tragedy strikes. In a fuddled state, Tommy rides out on his boat, never to come back.

The last 15 minutes of Another Round tie up an intricately woven tale with a funeral, neverending rounds of binge drinking with the graduating class, and Martin's leap into the water from the harbour, following a passionate round of dancing where he truly sets himself free. It is probably Tommy's manifestation of Anika and Martin being together forever coming to life, coupled with the three friends rejoicing to celebrate the legacy of Tommy, that reverses Martin's hesitance of letting go of his fears and dancing like no one's watching.

Vinterberg's altered vision while making the film was due to a heart-rending tragedy in his own family. The film is dedicated to his daughter Ida - the inspiration for incorporating the Danish drinking culture - who was supposed to play Martin's daughter but died in a car accident mere days before the shoot began. Thus, Another Round went from a story of harmless fun and amusing experiments to a larger, more introspective comment on adulthood.

The actors' bond as friends is so beautifully knit together that it feels like we've lost one of our own. Another Round ends up being worthy of its Oscar buzz and then some more, for film industries across the globe are yet to see a fabrication that reads as efficaciously as this.