Mauro Lanari

Midlife crisis, demotivated teachers, shaky marriages: facets of the Kierkegaardian angst like his 3 "Stages on Life's Way" which, as that voluminous book states, must be addressed with the motto "In vino veritas"? Is binge drinking, the alcoholic culture of the Nordic countries, a remedy for Calvinist puritanism in order to obtain disinhibition from the social contract, released vitality, dionysiacally liberated mind and body, the ode to joy? Unfortunately Vinterberg is ambiguous to the point of suggesting something very different, the epicureanism of "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die".

When the horrors of history become an apocalyptic metaphor of metaphysical evil, and when the soteriological hope consists in finding something healthy, salvable and salvific not in Hitler (who killed people already born), but in his mother (who sentenced to death people not yet existing). "I must not describe the famous sequence at the end. It must unfold as a surprise for you. It pretends to roll back history. You will see how. It is unutterably depressing, because history can never undo itself, and is with us forever" (Roger Ebert, 16 June 2010). Yet in the biblical context chosen by Klimov for his movie, always in Chapter 6 of the Apocalypse, verse 14 states: "the sky receded as a scroll when it is rolled up" (6:14 || Isaiah 34:4).