Sometimes it’s hard to get beyond the circumstances of a film’s production. In big, expensive movies, for example, it’s often easier to review the budget than the film, the production process casts a shadow over the finished production.
So it is with Another Round, an otherwise very good film that never quite, for me, escaped the real-life tragedy at its heart. More of that later.
The film, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar this year, is about alcohol and our relationship with it. Written and directed by Thomas Vinterberg, it is set in Denmark, a country with a long and abiding love affair with the hard stuff. At a birthday party, along with copious amounts of booze, schoolteacher Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) and his three friends and colleagues decide to try an experiment.
They have come across a theory by an obscure scientist that says we are born without enough alcohol in our system. If we top it up by a small amount every day, then we will open the doors of perception and begin to see the world as it was meant to be.
Basically, they decide to try it. Not getting drunk, but just a little buzz on for most of the day. There are rules though – no weekend drinking – this is science after all.
Initially things go well in some very entertaining moments. They loosen up, their teaching becomes more fun, their pupils think they are cool, and their relationships start to improve.
But of course, it cannot last. Everything has a price and, although the film focuses mainly on Martin, all four of them suffer the consequences of their experiment.
The performances are generally very good, but Mikkelsen, in particular, is excellent. Life has passed Martin by, and he hasn’t noticed. It’s all slipping away, and he is, literally, in the last chance saloon. He is clinging on by his fingernails and ironically alcohol may be his redemption.
Which brings me to the tragedy. In the film Martin has two sons, but he was supposed to have a son and a daughter. The actress playing his screen daughter, Ida Vinterberg – the director’s real-life daughter – was killed in a road accident a few days before she was due to start shooting. Vinterberg eventually finished the film, and it is dedicated to Ida.
Given that much of the comedy of Another Round has a bittersweet quality, I found myself watching the film with a melancholy air that stopped me enjoying it as much as I felt I should. It does however give the end of the film a, perhaps unintended, poignancy.
Another Round is a fine film with an air of sadness about it. Nothing quite so sorrowful though as the news that a Hollywood remake is in the works.
