From left to right: Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), Martin (Mads Mikkelson), Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), and Peter (Lars Ranthe)
Early-ish on in Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (2020), the gang gets drunk on Nikolaj’s birthday and we cut from the restaurant to a field of sorts (outside the restaurant? a faraway park? who knows). We see Martin, Tommy, Peter and the birthday boy do those lovely silly good kinda weird kinda fun drunken goofery things. It’s the soft light of twilight, they’re still in work clothes, but the shirts are out, an open button or two, ties askew—loose, airy, invincible. This is the best part of a night out, a moment of pure joy where they can arm wrestle in the air [see: frame] no table or desk or flat surface necessary, none needed. It’s almost as if the weightlessness they feel is enough to hold up their arms, bodies, and lives. A beat later Peter rushes in, jumps on the huddle. The gang collapses but Martin stays standing, victorious.
The film is about a group of middle-aged school teachers, each stuck in some kind of funk, who aim to be a little drunk all the time, with the caveats that they only drink until 8:00 PM, and only on weekdays. The claim is that they’re testing out the theory of a man named Finn Skårderud, a psychiatrist who posited that humans have a Blood Alcohol Content deficiency of 0.05%, and the more balanced thing to do, would be to stay 0.05% drunk all the time.
The experiment works for a while, the gang starts to feel more confident, they get better at their jobs, and learn to enjoy life again, but predictably the problems resurface: Martin’s and Nikolaj’s marriages fall apart, Tommy dies, and Peter, he’s generally kind of sad and alone. Eventually, Martin and Nikolaj find a way to reconcile with their wives, Peter starts seeing someone, and the three raise a toast to Tommy.
Under the silky glaze of booze and mid-life crises and addiction, Another Round is a film about change (the fantasy and reality of), and in this frame, from a moment before these awkwardly clustered men have decided to go through with the experiment, before their lives have visibly decomposed, it’s all about unworried gleeful fun. The putrefaction of their lives is temporarily suspended, deferred, and the tragedies that eventually strike them are only looming in retrospect. The drink turns out to be a catalyst for their entropy but for now, at least, they don’t know that and we don’t know that and so they have fun, pure, silly, goofy, boyish fun and we get to ride along on these ephemerally carefree loop-de-loops.
The film shows the passage of time without any definitive markers. We’re never sure if a day has passed or a week or six months—it’s all smudged together—but what we do have a vague sense of is visible time, i.e. how much time seems to be passing in what’s in front of us, in a scene. The deliberately unfocused view of the broader passage of time suggests that the film's perspective on life is immediate, myopic. All it cares about, all it’s capable of caring about is what’s visible, here, right now. The myopic mediation of time follows along with how, on a night out of heavy drinking, events seem to smush together, and you’re not sure how much time has passed, or what’s been going outside of what you can see or sense or feel right now. And the narrative follows that arc of being buzzed, tipsy, drunk, drunk drunk, no like seriously I love you all this is the greatest night ever I threw up on my shoe in the ally where’s my shoe I need a kebab damn I’m hungover pure abjection man wasn’t last night so fun.
Not to be too dramatic, but the shape of that crescendo and fall and re-rise and reflection, on the past, follows the arc of ageing, of the fundamentally entropic unfolding of life. And it’s fun, for sure, and it’s sad and weird, and shit happens, and we don’t realize how long it’s been since that thing happened and how has it been so long since but also wasn’t that yesterday. This frame, though, is about the suspension of our narcotic obsession with decomposition, a play with the inelasticity of time that only comes with an acute awareness of its inelasticity. Death, in short, is what animates life in this frame. And it’s fucking dope.