What is it about?
Four men dare an experiment to break out of their everyday life. An everyday life in which every day follows the same one. An everyday life that is replaced by one beer and schnapps following the next.
What is it really about?
We are sitting together and we are thinking who is the more boring of us. We are celebrating a birthday, but actually we are just sitting together and, to be precise, sitting opposite each other. Between us is an opulently laid table, where our aged, exhausted bodies can hold on to each other. We have lost our support and we have given up looking for it or even finding it again. He who toasts with water offends society. The most boring bends over at the bubbly shower.
Cheers.
The evening takes shape, becomes incarnate and prances around us ghostly, pricks us in the sides until we topple off the chair and crawl on the floor. Exactly the way we have been moving around for many years. But the figure grabs us, grabs us, lifts us up, whispers in our ears that whoever crawls also hides under stones. What the ear hears, the tame figure also hears, which dwells between both ears. Tame, after it has been tamed and not only lies hidden under the stone, but has become one with the stone. Heavy, frozen, cold, sharp-edged, repellent.
Cheers.
A hiccup that keeps beating the stone into my consciousness. Wasn’t there once a child? The child who plunged adventurously into all manner of fantasies and experiences; who embraced family open-heartedly; who met friends and strangers without prejudice; who took joy in rising and living. Is it in the stone? But how can I split open the stone to bring out at its core the lucid child within me? According to psychiatrist Finn Skårderud, the child can be rescued without force by hollowing out the stone drop by drop. Always adding so many droplets, so that a constant 0.5 per mille is reached and the stony dress is softened little by little. For man thirsts and thirsts above all for infantile intoxication of life; but man is parched from birth and pathologically sober, drained, petrified. Must wing himself to make life easier. But it is not Red Bull that gives wings, but vodka-Red Bull.
Cheers.
As soon as the first chicken god is washed into the stone, I rise from my crawling posture. Stand upright and I get dizzy in this unfamiliar posture. I threaten to topple over, but I dance frenetically. Lust for life grips me, my tongue wetted with wine flutters incessantly, I laugh as I haven’t for years. I am loved as I have not been for years. But the hiccups come back and knock the stone into my consciousness again and again. The thought that the child is still squatting in the stone for the most part, waiting to be released. The droplets too slowly eroding the stone; it must go faster, I must shoot hundreds of rivers over the stone, thousands of lakes, millions of waves of oceans; steadily and forever, until I hit side and the stone breaks open all of them.
Cheers.
And the intoxication is tangible, the child becomes tangible, but the intoxication slips from my hands like water. I think: Just one more sip against the hiccups. But I notice: the glassy look in the mirror resembles the bottom of a bottle. Empty. A burning glass of petrification. The hopelessness and desolation that first enveloped the child in the stony dress and envelops him again, although he beats his arms bloody on it. Pleasant memories that wash away and sad memories that wash up. I drown in my own sweat and urine if I don’t dive out of this whirlpool and emerge back into real life. For the whirlpool only circulates around me, swirling rhythmically in the waves of teaching. And I sit here alone. Everything moves, while nothing moves me. I hold on to the table so as not to fall over and crawl on the floor, and I ask myself: what is it that still intoxicates my life? And then I hear it knocking, and I don’t know at that moment whether it’s my family at the door or an overturned bottle in the refrigerator.
Conclusion
A film that makes the champagne corks pop like fireworks.
Facts
Original Title
Length
Director
Cast
Druk
117 Min
Thomas Vinterberg
Mads Mikkelsen as Martin
Thomas Bo Larsen as Tommy
Magnus Millang as Nikolaj
Lars Ranthe as Peter
Maria Bonnevie as Anika
What is Stranger’s Gaze?
he Stranger’s Gaze is a literary fever dream that is sensualized through various media — primarily cinema, which I hold in high esteem. Based on the distinctions between male and female gaze, the focus is shifted through a crack in a destroyed lens, in the hope of obtaining an unaccustomed, a strange gaze.
The Stranger's Gaze 