When Malcolm Lowry received the first printed copies of that
drunken
Divine Comedy
, as Sartre said, which is
Under the Volcano
, the first thing he did to celebrate his success in front of everyone and against everyone was to engage (of course) in a five-day melopea that took him to the hospital before liver than head.
The doctor who treated him could not help certifying not so much his death as his state of dying clairvoyance with a memorable phrase:
"Sick man affected by a strong attack of misfortune
.
"
Plato, for his part, decided to dispense with drinking and flute players to discuss Eros in
The Banquet
.
It is drunk or 'de-drunk', therefore, for the same reason: out of lucidity and lovemaking desire.
This is all about the European film of the worst season, in which the most was drunk alone, in which misfortunes attacked in the form of sad drunkenness.
Another round
, seen from a distance from the pandemic and its waves and with its indefatigable list of awards that includes the two Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Film and Direction, is, in its own way and with all the consequences, the film it deserves this cogorza that does not end.
Thomas Vinterberg, its director, had spent decades thinking about the idea of portraying the relationship of contemporary man with his social networks and his tension with alcohol.
The starting point was always the story of a group of men, high school teachers fed up with their own lives, who, one fine day,
challenge each other to maintain a daily level of 0.5 grams of alcohol in their blood.
And to see what happens.
However, something happened that bent his wrist and broke the director in half.
Four days before filming began, his daughter Ida, who was to make her acting debut in the film, died in an accident
.
The film continued, but the plan, as he admits, was already another.
And it is there, in that strange and diffuse bankruptcy in which
Another Round
lives
, for better and for worse.
It stopped being the brutal metaphysical comedy that was probably intended to be very close to
Celebration
(1998), the film that gave the filmmaker fame and prestige with the emergence of Dogma,
to become something more unstable, much more.
Let's say that in melodrama now the film has its reason for being and, also, its greatest weakness.
What wanted to be a devastating nihilist manifesto ends in the vagueness of the sentimental, in the complacency of the melodramatic
The director returns to the actor
Mads Mikkelsen
, with whom he loved so much in
The Hunt
(2012), and adds a good part of his usual fans to the team.
Another round
has a lot of cathartic family reunion, of, again, tragic pedal in community.
Let's say that Vinterberg
plays to provoke, to dislodge or simply to make reality (hence the provocation) what the common macho-face,
as Cristina Morales would say, in which we live installed long ago, accepted as a sign of identity: drinking lightens conscience and makes us more sincere.
In vino veritas
, as Pliny the Elder would add when he was young.
After all, how many of the men (always men) that we admire are not or were they consummate drinkers
, although not necessarily holy?
Churchill, Roosevelt, Hemingway, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Scott Fitzgerald and the first of those mentioned ... Here, as the film itself indicates, the only abstainer is Hitler.
And maybe Socrates, whose virtue prevented him from losing his sense of right no matter how much it was.
The daring of the film, it has already been said, is the starting point
: the clarity of the abyss that is so popular in Denmark.
They choose to drink not exactly for pleasure or just to see what happens, but to refute everything, to check the exact boundary of the loosely common and sincerely crappy place of the
sincere drunk
, let's call it that.
So far, little to discuss and much to celebrate.
The film advances precise, completely free and commanded by simply great performances of pure wobbly.
And always faithful to the supposedly original plan.
But it seems that Vinterberg stumbles again as only he likes in a markedly moral filmography.
As in
The Hunt
, the director does not hesitate to ruin much of what he has achieved when in the middle of the film he seems to be scared of the place he is going, which is none other than emptiness.
And thus,
what wanted to be a devastating nihilist manifesto ends in the lack of definition of the sentimental,
in the complacency, we said, of the melodramatic.
In other words, Vinterberg promises at the start a detailed deconstruction of every hypocritical, macho and lacerating gesture that surrounds the alcohol culture;
Vinterberg seems to venture the thesis that the problem is not what we do when we drink, but rather the drunkenness of a peaceful reality that passes for sober ...
And no.
He takes a step back and prefers to dominate his voice, obscure the narration and feign a depth that, in reality, is more of a confusion.
Understandable because of the tragedy of the aforementioned, but confusion in the end.
A man alone before a precipice is a conscious man;
aware of his fear, of his radical freedom (to commit suicide even) and of the deep sense of time.
His.
Everyone's.
Kierkegaard, as Danish as Vinterberg, called it anguish
and placed in the hands of that paralyzing and terribly lucid sensation a millimeter out of nowhere the key to finding the meaning of almost everything.
Now let's reimagine the hero who walks on the edge of the abyss but drunk.
So completely drunk that to the consciousness of himself and of his not necessarily happy time he now adds the metaphysical uncertainty of a simple stumble.
There Malcolm Lowry and many more than we imagine.
The problem, as the doctor said, is not the alcohol but the misfortunes.
+ The superb performance of the leading quintet led by Mads Mikkelsen simply intoxicates-The hangover of such a horrid and complacent outcome is the closest thing to a hard hangover
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