Who among us has not imagined themselves wittier, more charming after a couple of glasses of wine?
The easing of anxiety and inhibition that alcohol facilitates have made it the go-to social lubricant for millennia, though most of us know from bitter experience that drinking causes more problems than it solves.
This simple lesson is conveniently forgotten by four middle-aged friends in Thomas Vinterberg’s well observed Danish drama Another Round, which won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars.
Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) teaches history at a school in Copenhagen. He has recently lost all enthusiasm for his profession and a similar lethargy afflicts his marriage to Anika (Maria Bonnevie).
Martin is stalled, fatally lacking in joie de vivre, and his friends Nicolaj (Magnus Millang), Peter (Lars Ranthe) and Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen) also find themselves at an existential crossroads.
They’re all colleagues of his and at a boozy lunch, Nicolaj reveals a cunning plan to re-energise their tired lives.
He cites (and probably misconstrues) the theories of a Norwegian psychiatrist called Finn Skarderud, and the suggestion that people are born 0.05pc short of their proper quota of alcohol, the amendment of which will make us more relaxed and creative.
Mads Mikkelsen (left) goes off the rails self-medicating with his colleagues in Another Round
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Mads Mikkelsen (left) goes off the rails self-medicating with his colleagues in Another Round
To this end, Nicolaj makes a modest proposal — all four men will conduct a ‘scientific’ experiment by keeping their blood alcohol levels at a steady 0.05pc throughout the working day, and only stop drinking at 8pm each night. Initially, the results are miraculous.
Tippling away at the hip flasks during bathroom breaks, the friends find their working lives instantly transformed.
Martin rediscovers his zest for history, Peter, a music teacher, leads his class choir to unexpected heights, and Tommy, the school’s football coach, draws inspired performances from his hitherto useless team.
There are fringe benefits on the home front too, particularly for Martin, who manages to reconnect with Anika and his two sons on a family camping trip to a lakeside wilderness. “I missed us,” his wife says, but is it really them?
This initial success prompts Nicolaj to suggest upping the ante and the group agree to raise their intake. Things get well and truly messy when binges begin and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of them that if four men take up professional drinking, at least one of them is going to find it hard to stop.
Vinterberg’s film has been accused of glibness when it comes to the dangers of drinking, but I’m not sure that this is fair. The Danes, to some extent, share our national enthusiasm for alcohol and early on in Another Round, the four men’s experiment is presented as a bit of a lark.
His three friends snigger when a tipsy Martin walks into a wall in the canteen and, at one point, Peter suggests that a student take a few stiff swigs to deal with his terror of exams.
But once the boozing gets going in earnest, the squalor of heavy drinking is unstintingly depicted, particularly in a sequence where the men attempt to break their blood alcohol level record.
Martin will find out that his drinking has been duly noted by his wife and alcohol’s insidious addictiveness is explored through the good-hearted character of Tommy.
There’s a woozily poetic quality, too, to Vinterberg’s direction, which is anchored by a still but simmering central performance from the excellent Mikkelsen.
In the English-speaking world, Mikkelsen only ever seems to enter stage right as a villain, but he’s a nuanced and intelligent character actor and gives a compelling portrayal of a man lost in the middle of his life here.
Without ever meaning to, Martin has become abstracted from those around him, remote from his family, quasi-redundant in his work.
Alcohol rouses him from this stupor, but the remedy is kill or cure, and many skeletons are unearthed by the subsequent loss of inhibition.
Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story (No Cert, IFI, 96mins)
When Jackie Collins died in 2015, obituarists struggled to strike the right note.
Her books were often derided for their agricultural prose style, her blingy lifestyle could easily be construed as tasteless, and her supposed feuds with her sister Joan were manna from heaven for the gossip columnists.
But in this affectionate and well made documentary, we get to admire her resourcefulness, classiness, and inner strength. Growing up in the shadow of her beautiful sister wasn’t easy, especially when Joan became a Hollywood star. But Jackie, despite various personal travails, found a route to self-expression in writing.
Her novels described the luxurious and sex-ridden lives of the ‘jet set’. And though male writers sneered at her prose (in Lady Boss we see Clive James cattily lashing out), Jackie’s books sold more than 500 million copies.
To promote them, she created a ‘Jackie Collins’ persona, whose leopard prints and big hair became a suit of armour. In the face of much adversity, Jackie found a way of living on her own terms and even obliquely helping the cause of feminism.
A slasher film with tongue in cheek, Christopher Landon’s Freaky dreams up a preposterous premise and flogs the hell out of it. Millie (Kathryn Newton) is a shy high schooler whose social life is thwarted by her needy and recently widowed mom.
Her small town has been haunted for years by tales of a gruesome serial murderer. One night, while she’s waiting for a lift, Millie is attacked by the killer (Vince Vaughn), who stabs her with a ceremonial Aztec knife. It has magic and, in the ensuing scuffle, a swapping of souls occurs and when Millie wakes, she’s in the killer’s enormous body.
Millie’s person, meanwhile, is now occupied by a homicidal maniac, who goes to school to settle old scores. It is possible, I suppose, that this ridiculous idea might, with sufficient wit and charm, have been made to work. But wit and charm are thin on the ground in this drab and busy movie that expects us to find extreme violence hilarious.
Vaughn, meanwhile, seems to think that being a teenage girl involves running around screaming and flapping one’s arms about. He’s hard to like here, and he’s not alone.
