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Dancing Through Another Round

Body language is everything right now. Did you feel like dancing yesterday? We had a power failure in LA --so common now, between fires and earthquakes we have rolling blackouts--so I couldn't watch the Inaugural show--but I felt like @theofficialmads, the tall, hunky, gorgeous Danish actor in Another Round, the new film from Thomas Vinterberg. I wanted to bust a move.

The film is a masterpiece of understatement and cool even as the four male protagonists-teachers in a secondary school--have their individual meltdowns. Ostensibly to see if a theory about maintaining a certain blood alcohol level they read about will hold water(it does, and then it spectacularly doesn't), it's really about pinning your hopes on an external force to ramp your creativity, your intelligence, your grace, whatever it is that you haven't got going as much as you might wish. Guess how that turns out.

The guys try to coax Martin (Mikkelsen) through the whole film to get up and dance. They dance. But Martin resists. Then at the very end when things have gone from bad to worse in his marriage, there is finally a ray of hope, and he bursts into spontaneous movement on a pier surrounded by his graduating students (all wonderful).

Mikkelsen was trained as a @marthagrahamdance dancer--which seems to be how I am seeing the world this week--and that ability to express things with your middle is on full display in the film. Once cast as a villain, he now seems the embodiment of male angst and joy.