Another Round · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Four men at a wood-panelled restaurant table, ordering another bottle, and writing things down. That is the image to hold onto. Not the drinking — Danish cinema hardly needs an excuse to film drinking — but the notebook. Martin and his three colleagues decide that the road back into their own lives runs through a protocol: hypothesis, dose, observation, results. The joke, which stops being a joke, is that grown men reach for a method because they can no longer simply reach.

Deleuze has a name for that particular paralysis, and it is worth borrowing because it explains why a premise this daft feels so exact. Most cinema before the war, he argues, runs on the action-image: someone perceives a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation. Perception flows into movement without a hitch. What broke afterwards he calls the crisis of the action-image — characters who see their circumstances with perfect clarity and can no longer produce an adequate response to them. Vinterberg opens on four cases of it. Martin is not confused about his marriage. Clarity is all he has, and it does nothing.

Underneath the action-image sits the small Bergsonian idea Deleuze builds everything from: a living creature is an interval, a gap between what comes in and what goes out. He calls it a centre of indetermination — the hesitation that makes you a subject rather than a billiard ball. Read the teachers' pseudo-science straight and it is a theory of exactly that gap. We are born a fraction of a percent short, they say, and the deficit can be topped up. They believe the interval has gone slack and can be chemically re-tuned. The unnerving thing is how right they are for about forty minutes. The classroom is the film's laboratory, and the men visibly get better at their jobs before they get worse at everything.

Then the other machine starts. Deleuze keeps a category for films where appetite runs the show beneath the social surface: the impulse-image, his naturalism. Its structure is precise. A fully furnished ordinary world — gymnasium corridors, suburban kitchens, that restaurant — turns out to be the crust over an originary world of raw drive, and in Denmark the drive is licensed, sociable, everywhere. The drive fixes on a fetish, a part-object charged far past its size: the bottle, the ever more ambitious meals and wine, the dose itself, measurable and therefore ownable. And it travels a line of slope, downhill and irreversible, toward exhaustion or death. The film's four movements — reawakening, overreach, collapse, aftermath — are that slope drawn with a straightedge. It costs a life.

That dramaturgy has a specific ancestor. Days of Wine and Roses (1962) invented the drinking arc as a shape for a film: staging and performance calibrated to a rising and falling blood-alcohol curve instead of to conventional plot beats. Leaving Las Vegas refined it into physiology, and Cage's graded portrayal of a man across stages of drunkenness is the direct performance debt Mikkelsen is paying. Watch his face and you can read the dose. Deleuze would call it a potisign: not a face expressing one settled feeling but a face of thresholds, micro-movements accumulating toward a change of state. The film's credibility lives there. Nobody plays drunk; they play a number.

Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, who once shot Victoria in a single unbroken take, keeps the camera close, handheld, following. We feel it in the room — Deleuze's dicisign, a camera that perceives men in the act of perceiving each other, and much of this film is four people watching each other's dose. Then comes its best formal idea: Grøvlen tunes the image to the experiment. Sober passages are cooler, contained. The drinking loosens the picture, warmer and more fluid, before it curdles. Perception itself comes unanchored — the drifting, liquid perception Deleuze calls the reume. This is Bazin's inheritance running through Dogme 95: available light, no artifice, faith that the unstyled image can carry truth. Vinterberg codified that in the nineties and here spends it, so that cinematography becomes the argument — alcohol makes the world briefly more vivid before it makes it worse.

Vinterberg's real invention is subtler than the premise. Festen gave him the communal ritual as crucible, handheld and cracked open. The Idiots gave the template: adults collectively adopting one transgressive rule and observing what it does to them. Dogme 95 itself was a protocol, a vow with numbered clauses. What Vinterberg does in Another Round is turn the manifesto into the plot. The rule-bound group experiment stops being how the film was made and becomes what the film is about. Lindholm's screenwriting adds the procedural spine — A Hijacking's clinical tracking of people under sustained, escalating pressure — and The Hunt supplies Mikkelsen as a decent man measured by a community's verdict.

Around the fiction runs an essay. The Kierkegaard epigraph, the quasi-academic framing, and that deadpan montage of famous drunk statesmen: Deleuze would file the archival insert as an attraction-image, a passage that figures the thesis instead of acting it, and the whole apparatus as a discourse-image — an image that poses a problem it has no intention of solving. The film never adjudicates its own hypothesis. It just keeps taking measurements.

Which makes the ending the boldest thing in it. After a death, a mainstream drama owes you a verdict. Vinterberg pays in a body instead. Deleuze's late cinema of the body replaces action with attitude: the body stops serving the plot and starts carrying time, and a posture becomes what he calls a gest — a stance that exposes the whole social relation a person has been living inside. Mikkelsen trained as a dancer and gymnast before he acted, and when Martin goes up on the dock, forty years of teacherly Danish restraint is visible in the shape of a man breaking it. Notice too that he does not decide to dance. Scarlet Pleasure's track arrives, the muted realist soundscape gives way, and the music takes over the motor. That is Deleuze's movement of world — the character stops being the source of the movement and is carried by it. The film holds. It does not tell you whether the experiment worked.

What did it do to film? It proved that an essay and a crowd-pleaser can be the same object, that a dosage curve can replace plot, and that a needle-drop can be an argument rather than a shortcut. It is too recent to have named children, but it hands forward a usable device: take the discipline you shoot under and make it the thing your characters submit to.

Rewatch it for the temperature of the image. Then watch the interval — the beat between when these men see something and when they do anything about it. It shortens, then it disappears, and by the end the world is moving them. Whether that is a rescue or the last stage of the slope is the question the film hands you, still open, mid-leap.