How lucky that there are still films like this in our time. Films that address their viewers as grown-up, responsible people who will already know how to assess something.
“Rausch”, the new film by Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, is about four high school teachers who, inspired by a theory by the Finnish psychiatrist Finn Skårderud, undertake an experiment. Skårderud’s thesis: Man was born too little in the blood with half a per mille alcohol content. If he drinks this 0.5 per mille and keep this value constant, life will change. He is then more courageous, funnier, more witty, radiant, more powerful, in short: better. This is what the four men, who are all forty and over and exhausted from the eternal obligations and repetitions of life, want to try out. The scientific component is very important to them: It should be drunk for a serious reason and with good intent, which is of course also a great excuse for drinking.
Two of the men are married and have children. The other two live alone. One teaches history, a psychology, a sport and a music. If you may say so, they are completely normal men who have all had their experiences of pain. They are all played incredibly real: Thomas Bo Larsen is the sports teacher, Magnus Millang is Nikolaj, Lars Ranthe teaches music. And Mads Mikkelsen has the lead role as Martin’s history teacher.
We get to know him as a man without shape or color. He is no longer like it used to be, says his wife, he is no longer there, he is invisible. She has long since withdrawn within the marriage. The two teenage sons don’t look up from their cell phones when their father is talking to them. And it’s no different in the classroom. Nobody respects Martin. He’s an insecure man who basically gave up. That is his life, and there is probably nothing more to come.
And then his colleague Nikolaj, the psychology teacher, suggests this alcohol thing.
The four men are currently sitting in a fine restaurant. Nikolaj turns 40 and throws a men’s evening. Generously (his wife is wealthy) he lets champagne come, followed by particularly good vodka and selected French red wine. Only Martin holds back at first. He still has to drive, drinks water. Oh come on, say the friends, who are becoming increasingly relaxed. At some point the thick cloud of melancholy hangs only over Martin, who finally also takes up alcohol. And the way he empties the first glass of expensive red wine in one gulp, with tears of desperation in his eyes, one suspects that Martin has a story with alcohol, but this interpretation is left to the viewer. It is not explained. And you never get tired of looking in Mads Mikkelsen’s beautiful and enigmatic face for answers to all the secrets that he seems to have in himself and guards like a treasure.
The film doesn’t make any moral judgments, it doesn’t try to educate anyone
While the four friends temporarily drink away their Middle Ages depression that evening and become more and more exuberant and happy until they actually dance, the film plays music by the Swedish rococo composer Carl Michael Bellman. A male choir, beautiful with a harpsichord, but the text has it all: Empty your glass, death is already waiting.
The subject of the film is set.
The four men are now beginning their experiment, which is supposed to be in the service of science. They drink secretly in the school toilet and use a measuring device to accurately check whether the alcohol level is correct. After glorious first results – they all suddenly act like liberated, full of self-confidence and a new zest for life – at some point they increase the dose. You have also put together a firm reason for this, everything continues to run as part of a strictly defined experiment. You probably don’t reveal too much when you say that things will of course get out of hand. But the film doesn’t make any moral judgments. He makes no attempt to educate his viewers by explicitly demonizing alcohol or having a simple American message like “Don’t try this at home”. Rather, it shows both sides of the intoxication: the inspiring as well as the destructive. In this film, both have their validity, both are allowed to coexist here.
Before filming, the director and actor spent a weekend drinking together
The actors play the various degrees of drunkenness so convincingly that one would swear they were really drunk while filming. The first stage in which people speak a little louder, act a little more lively and their posture relaxes. Finally, the gross motor disorders when someone can no longer avoid a wall that suddenly appears in front of them. Because drunks do not use their hands to catch when they fall, mats were placed on the floor when shooting so that the actors could fall without seriously injuring themselves.
The drunkenness is only acted out in every scene – there was not a drop of alcohol during the filming, but the four actors and the director spent some kind of alcohol bootcamp weekend during which they drank and had themselves filmed and then analyzed how how much per mille affects your facial expressions, gestures and motor skills. For the advanced stage of drunkenness, they watched many Russian YouTube videos of unconscious drunk people trying to do something. When Vinterberg told Mads Mikkelsen, with whom he had already worked in the fantastic film “Die Jagd” in 2012, about the project that it would then be “Der Rausch”, he showed him a video in which two men tried in vain for almost four minutes to clamp a piece of tree trunk onto a bike rack; if you want to google: “2 Incredible Drunk Men”.
The experiment begins strictly, but it doesn’t stay that way: The four teachers after a wild night in a pub.
(Photo: Rolf Konow / Weltkino)
You can get the alcohol in this great movie about that human condition but also understand it as a symbol. Thomas Vinterberg himself named it in an interview. However, it was only his wife who brought him up on it. She is an actress and vicar and can be seen in “Der Rausch” as Nikolaj’s wife. She was smarter than him, he told him New York Magazine and explained to him what his film was actually about. “She said, Thomas, this film is about the uncontrollable” https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/. “
Four days after filming began, Ida Vinterberg, the 19-year-old daughter of Thomas Vinterberg and his first wife, the director Maria Walbom, died in an accident. It happened on the motorway in Belgium, someone had checked their cell phone while driving. Her mother was present in the accident and was slightly injured herself. Ida Vinterberg should have played Martin’s daughter in “Der Rausch”, her role was then replaced by a second son. The film was shot in her school and many scenes are set in her classroom. It was actually an act of impossibility that Thomas Vinterberg would quit the film after this tragedy. But he told himself that his daughter would not have wanted him to give up. She was always very strict with his scripts, but she loved this one. She wrote him a letter in which she declared her unconditional love for the project and for him as an artist. After her death, psychiatrists and psychologists were around him and they had the opinion that if he could eat and shower and look people in the eyes without crying, then he should probably work.
They would then have made the film for Ida. It is dedicated to her. It has become an ode to life, a celebration of human fate, which is that we must die. Nothing is forever. Everything passes. But we are still here to testify.
To life!
Pressure, DK 2020 – Director: Thomas Vinterberg. Screenplay: T. Vinterberg, Tobias Lindholm. Camera: Sturla Brandth Grøvlen. With: Mads Mikkelsen, Magnus Millang, Thomas Bo Larsen, Lars Ranthe. World cinema, 117 minutes.