Another Round

Martin is an unmotivated lecturer, students do not listen to him and his lectures are rather confusing; the marital relationship seems to be withering.

During a dinner with colleagues/friends a theory is told that with a small amount of alcohol in the blood the slight altered state of the senses could help them live. They therefore decide to procure a blood alcohol level of 0.5 grams/liter maximum in order to produce a state of euphoria compatible with daily life.

Against the background of Denmark, where recent high school graduates typically flock to the cities in mid-June, when school ends, to celebrate and get drunk in each other's company, challenging each other's resistance to alcohol, the film does not hesitate to portray the culturally widespread aspect of drinking that can easily turn into addiction and alcoholism.

The outcomes of the experiment for each of the friends will have unpredictable and surprising effects.

Kierkegaard is mentioned more than once because he is surely the most famous Danish philosopher in the history of philosophy and because his concepts determine the birth of existentialism, that current according to which, essence is not enough to say the human but it is necessary to refer to concrete existence. That existence that strains the lives of the protagonists, between families, children, profession and socio-cultural context.

Life is beyond one's plans, and options, crippling or not, can compromise or enable the future path. The artificially produced thrill of the four friends seems the only possible antidote to the fear and trembling that existence entails.

Re-engaging his students in classes for Martin, like recovering intimacy with his wife, returning to reclaim his own existence involves a choice, a leap Kierkegaard would say, a recovery of freedom not as a necessity but as a possibility even paradoxical and scandalous.

Vintenberg, with shoulder camera as per Dogma 95 rules, shoots a dramatic, funny, tragic and comic comedy, punctuated by the rhythms of a sometimes challenging, sometimes playful existence. An adventure, that of life, to which one is born unprepared and, whether authentic or inauthentic, always touches the boundaries of absurdity and paradox.

Vintenberg resorts to Kierkegaard to tell the novel story of existence and to understand that it cannot and should not be understood.