One more goes: tragicomedy “One For The Road” with Frederick Lau

One more goes
Tragicomedy “One For The Road” with Frederick Lau

A little beer after work won’t do any harm, right? Especially not when your whole circle of friends is hanging out at the bar anyway. Or it’s your best friend’s birthday. Or there is something else to celebrate. In the The tragicomedy “One For The Road” is about the slow and painful realization that one’s own drinking behavior may not be so harmless after all. It is the third film by the duo Oliver Ziegenbalg and Markus Goller.

As with “Friendship!” and “25 km/h” Ziegenbalg wrote the script and Goller directed. But this time “One For The Road” is not a road movie – even if the film title and past projects might initially suggest otherwise. Instead, the focus is on the inner journey of the protagonist Mark.

The serious nuances come

Grimme Prize winner Frederick Lau plays the construction manager of a large construction site in Berlin, who has a lot of responsibility during the day. The nights when he staggers blissfully from the bar to the Späti seem all the easier. All of this doesn’t go well for long. When Mark reparks his car while drunk, he loses his driver’s license. He makes a bet with his best friend: He won’t drink another drop of alcohol until he gets his driver’s license back. Only Mark himself is surprised that it will be so difficult for him. His circle of friends, the MPU course instructor and the cinema audience have already known for a long time at this point: Mark has an alcohol problem.

As befits a real Ziegenbalg-Goller film, the protagonist doesn’t have to go through it alone, but is given a “partner in crime” at his side. In the MPU course, Mark meets Helena (Nora Tschirner), who is an alcoholic herself. The fact that there is only a subtle hint of a love story between the two and that their encounter doesn’t magically make all the problems disappear into thin air is good for the film. Instead, it becomes clear: life with an alcohol addiction is hard, no one saves anyone here.

Although “One For The Road” initially appears cheerful and poppy, the film’s strengths emerge in the serious nuances. For example, when Mark’s friends do an alcoholic self-test with him – and in the end they have to answer “yes” to almost every question. Or in the moments when people quietly ask why Mark drinks so much in the first place. The fact that this critical voice is completely missing at the beginning of the film is made up for by the fact that it never places itself above the film’s characters.

A certain sadness spreads

Instead, we meet Mark and Helena at eye level, without any finger-wagging. It is precisely this approach that enables cinema viewers to critically compare their own drinking behavior and that of those around them with what they see on the screen.

Nevertheless, the film tries to carry a certain lightness with it to the end. Similar to Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Rush” with Mads Mikkelsen, which is about trying to maintain a certain alcohol level, there are some tragic-comic scenes. So the protagonists can certainly laugh about their own downfalls. Nevertheless, there is a certain sadness to the whole thing that doesn’t go away when the credits roll.

Trailer

dpa