Author: The secretary of the round head
Recently, Danish director Thomas Vinterberg's new work "The Alcohol Project" (Druk) has received a lot of praise. The work was shortlisted for the Cannes Film Festival last year and subsequently swept the European Film Awards, winning four awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Screenplay, and is expected to be one of the popular candidates for the 2021 Oscar for Best International Film. Although 2020 is undoubtedly a "small year" for European cinema and even world cinema, this work still has its own superiority, and we can also see Winterberg's creative vein.
Creative context
From his own experience as a director, Winterberg's work is roughly divided into three parts, one of which is represented by his most famous works", Festen (Family Feast) and "The Hunt" (Jagten), which mainly deal with the evil and dark aspects of human nature, mainly exploring ethical issues. In these works, Winterberg tries to show us a world with ethical depth, in short, the emotional relationships in this world are not taken for granted as we think, such as the unconditional love of parents for their children, the child must be the embodiment of goodness, and so on. For him, the most unlikely to do evil is often able to do the most unacceptable things under established ethical rules, and we are psychologically defenseless against them. When they break through the ethical constraints, we are not only subverted by the three views, but also followed by a huge sense of powerlessness. Similar discussions are quite profound in both "Family Feast" and "Hunting", especially in the latter, where an angelic-like little girl who does not understand the world has always insisted that the male protagonist sexually assaulted him, and in the face of this powerful ethical accusation, max Mickelson's male protagonist has little ability to fight back, and eventually can only become the moral prey of the community, and the choreographer is also using this to sound the alarm for "political correctness" in Europe and the world.
Nordic trend?
The reason why Winterberg has a similar discussion is actually closely related to the solidified, conservative, and non-existent Lutheran Christian social culture in Northern Europe (especially Denmark). In this culture, Nordic directors have a clear line of ethics, from Karl Delayer to Russ von Trier and Winterberg in Denmark and from Ingmar Bergmann to Ruben Ostlund in Sweden. Of course, many of today's Nordic directors are not content with mere social criticism, but instead push the issue to a deeper level: they try to make some kind of experiment within the existing social culture, and let a special group collide with the established institutional framework, resulting in a strong drama. Whether this social experiment has formed a new Nordic current is too early to conclude, but the creative paths of the likes of Winterberg and Ostlund do have obvious similarities: from discovering real moral dilemmas to creating possible moral anxieties, they all have extremely deep observations and reflections on society.
In the case of Winterberg alone, Kollektivet and The Alcohol Project are such works. However, "The Alcohol Project" does not have a Bergman-style bitter vendetta, but introduces the audience in a light-hearted and humorous tone, and then makes the meaning itself surface through contrast: at the beginning of the film, a group of carefree young people drink and have fun, and even chain law enforcement officers to the subway, for Winterberg, this is what youth should look like. Later, we see that their teachers, four male high school teachers facing a midlife crisis, began to conduct some kind of "research" in order to get out of their depressed state of life and to return to their spirited youth: they tried to test in themselves the statement of the Norwegian philosopher Finn Skadrood that the human blood was born with a 0.05% alcohol concentration. As the plot unfolds, the alcohol intake of the four people gradually increases, the situation gradually begins to spiral out of control, and the pleasure brought by alcohol gradually fades, adding a new burden to their lives, bringing more frustration and wandering.
In recent years, the internationalized Winterberg masterpiece Que Ru has finally returned to its own subject matter and field after making several mediocre works such as Kursk and Far From the Madding Crow. The brilliance of "The Alcohol Project" is not in the outstanding plot, but in how the director deals with the subjective feelings of people when they are drunk. For this problem, Winterberg's practical and simple approach has been realized, he uses handheld photography + close-up to bring strong emotion to the picture, so that the audience and the male protagonist are immersed in the real image.
Pressure presentation
In fact, this approach also comes from Winterberg's long-standing approach: as early as 1995, together with Russ von Trier and Kristen Levine, he launched the dogma95', hoping to instill a sense of simplicity in filmmaking, emphasizing the purity of film composition and focusing on the true story and the actors' performances themselves. Although the ten precepts of the Dogmar 95 movement (field shooting, sound-picture synchronization, handheld photography, color 35mm, not accepting genre films, etc.) have become history to some extent, the Alcohol Project is still imbued with an unpretentious sincerity (even if a little rough), and it is difficult for any adult who has drunk alcohol not to be infected by the shots of the protagonists after drinking: the world around them suddenly becomes transparent and clear, and the backlit lens is warm enough and dizzying enough. Mickelson's performance also adds a lot to the film, through his eyes, we see helplessness, contradictions, long-suppressed releases... Although usually expressionless, there is often a huge and rich amount of emotions under this face.
The lens language of "Project Alcohol" makes this movie seem real and unreal. What we see through the lens is often the intoxicated person's unrealistic imagination of the world, and underneath it, it is a cold, inescapable, and stressful reality. The film microcosm shows how a man with a life-controlled life slides to the brink of a life breakdown. Interestingly, for Winterberg, a person with a temperate lifestyle seems to be more likely to drink heavily because they lack an outlet to release stress.
The cold climate, the career without progress, and the cold family emotional life make people very unconsciously fall into a state of life, so that when the male protagonist looks back, he finds that he has not gone out with his wife for seven or eight years. The "heart" of youth is gone, replaced by a static, solidified, almost eternal meaninglessness that slowly consumes the will of man, and this situation does not seem to be an accident of individuality— the hero's wife says that alcoholism is not a problem of one person, and that "the whole country begins to drink like a madman."
The world's problem?
Interestingly, the film abruptly inserts a series of historical images, including drunken images of former Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, former French President Sarkozy, Belgian politician Mitchell Darden, etc. in public, which makes the film take on a hint of political irony and also pushes the film's "drill" into a culture - the alcoholism tradition shared by all high latitudes such as Northern Europe and Russia. It is in this sense that this question from Winterberg through four middle-aged men is both a physiological question (how to get back to youth?). ), which is also a social problem (how to get rid of alcoholism?). It is also a philosophical question: how can man escape from his "life", how can he escape his own predicament, as Shown in Bella Tarr's famous work The Horse of Turin, escape from the inevitable cycle and fate of getting dressed, pulling carts, and eating potatoes every day?
Obviously, Winterberg and his screenwriter can't and don't want to come up with a solution, and the ending is ambiguous: the male protagonist Martin, surrounded by a group of graduating students, begins to drink and dance, and finally even jumps into the sea. The film freezes at the moment of jumping into the sea, but the contradictions are not resolved, and alcohol does not allow a person to truly restore the courage and strength to survive—it is at best a redemption coupon with a expiration date, and when the wine is awakened, the indulgence will be a greater nothingness— as Winterberg has always said. So, is this life? (Secretary of the Round Head)
Source: Beijing Youth Daily