Another Round - directed by Thomas Vinterberg 2020

Available on Mubi

Anyone who saw Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (The Celebration) (1998) will no doubt remember the tension in that highly pressured film, whereby a family get-together degenerates into the airing of terrible secrets. Festen was the first in what became known as the Dogme 95 movement in film, where Vinterberg and his fellow Dane Lars von Trier placed the emphasis on plot and potent performance rather than high-flying production techniques. Festen was intense but it had its tragi-comic moments. It left me reeling in a good way.

Twenty two years on, Vinterberg’s film Another Round maintains the emotional power by delving into the private lives of its lead protagonists, but is much lighter in tone, being a comedy with some dark parts but an overall sense of positivity.

Mads Mikkelsen plays a teacher called Martin at a ‘gymnasium’ - the term given for secondary school in Scandinavian countries. His remit is to teach history, but his voice is quiet, he waffles and skips from subject to subject, and his pupils don’t respect him. His mousy demeanour is a symptom of his depression - he feels as if an unbridgeable chasm has developed between him and his wife Annika (Maria Bonnevie), who always seems busy with the children.

To make matters worse, Martin’s pupils demand a meeting between them and their parents and him, to discuss the poor teaching. The humiliation is compounded by the fact that everyone in the school knows about his pupils’ discontent.

One day, Martin is invited out to dinner to celebrate the birthday of a teacher colleague. Three other male teachers - Thomas Bo Larsen playing Tommy; Magnus Milland as Nikolaj, Lars Ranthe as Peter - attend, and although Martin starts off not drinking alcohol, he is soon tempted by the encouragement of the others. Over the course of the dinner, one of the group talks about an idea vaunted by a psychiatrist, Finn Skårderud, who suggested that humans are born with a deficiency of 0.05% alcohol in their bloodstream. (Two points: the comment by Skarderud was actually made in a preface to a new print run of a book first published in 1881 about the emotional effects of alcohol, ‘On the psychological effects of wine' by Edmondo de Amicis. Secondly, Skarderud was struck off the medical register for fraud. So it’s likely that the teachers were interpreting the psychiatrist’s comment liberally.) The four men decide to try this theory out.