Youth, a magical word, feeling of infinity, glamorous laughter, drunkenness of mirth. What makes youth so attractive? The intensity of life, spark of joy circulating in the veins thanks to young eyes, fresh emotions? The eternal yearning of it, the never-ending complaint of its shortness,sorrow because of losing the sweet balm of beauty of body and soul. 

“What is youth?”

“A dream.”

“What is love?”

“The dream’s contents.”

Kierkegaard explains youth and love with these words. This is how the fascinating film “Another Round” by Thomas Vinterberg starts. Can youth be eternal, if there is “eternity until tomorrow” as in the film “Eternity and A Day” by Theo Angelopulos? Time, flowing with the endless energy of a waterfall, always taking and bringing the core of life is the source to being young forever, this eternal dream of blue. Of course there are ways to befriend time, cherishing change in our experience of today, the essential thing in our lives, today, the only treasure we have, beyond past and future. 

“Another Round”, “Druk” in Danish, is an international film, a co-production between Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden. It was released in 2020. The film was awarded an Oscar for Best International Feature Film and nominated for Best Director. It also had Bafta Award for Best Film Not In The English Language and European Film Award for Best Film. Mads Mikkelsen act as Martin and Maria Bonnevie as Anika. Martin, Nikolaj, Tommy and Peter are teachers at a gymnasium school in Copenhagen. They all suffer from the boredom in their lives, both at work and their personal lives. Martin’s eyes tell us the story actually, he has lost all the spark of life, wandering on a chain of never-changing days. His wife, Anika, is hardly at home at nights, she works, because there is no reason to be together. They just live in the same house, but they do not live together, share anything. At Nikolaj’s 40th birthday dinner party, the friends talk about a theory on the deficiency of a person having a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.05%. According to the psychiatrist Finn Skårderud, one should be at 0.05% to be more creative and easygoing. They decide to have an experiment to test this theory. They try to maintain their BAC at 0.05, but they never drink after 8.00 p.m. or at the weekends. Life changes for all of them, the brightness of pleasure is always felt, just as it was years back. They are the embodiment of Dionysos, fuel of being alive is with them. They want to take the experiment to a higher level, but things get worse. One should know when to stop, so they feel it is time to end it. Tommy, however, goes on drinking, having more and more problems, unfortunately. 

As they have found the youth in their souls, now it will be with them as there is life. They are the followers of Baudelaire in a way in his lines of being continually intoxicated:

“You have to be always drunk. That’s all there’s to it-it’s the only way… So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.” The summary of the film is Martin’s dancing to the joy of life to the rhythm of Scarlet Pleasure’s “What A Life”, the scenes remaining in your mind for a long time, making you full of the same energy. John Berger mentions artist’s, dancer’s being “possessed, inhabited by a force or a set of compulsions coming from outside her or his own self, ‘el duende’, a quality, a resonance which makes a performance unforgettable” in his book “Confabulations”. Garcia Lorca lectured on el duende in 1933 in Buenos Aires and he said it “works on the dancer’s body like wind on sand. It changes a girl by magic power, into a lunar paralytic…gives a woman’s hair the odor of a midnight sea port:and at every instant works the arms of a performer with gestures that are the mothers of all the dances of all the ages.” 

As long as we have this spark pumping in our hearts, dreaming is with us, visions of love are within our reach. Being alive, feeling that you are alive is worth celebrating again and again. So youth is not limited, it is timeless, if you know the language of the heart, spiritual intoxication is given in the freshness of every day, the touch of the sun on the sea, the odour of nature, the colour of notes of beauty in our souls, sometimes with some tinge of pain because we are humans, but always in the blossom of life.