One for the Road

Director: Markus Goller (Germany). Year of Release: 2022

The gent’s toilets of a pub / hotel bar. From behind, we watch a man pissing. When he’s done pissing, he picks up the bottle of beer he’d placed next to the urinal. The Slits are playing I Heard it through the Grapevine. After a while, he leaves the pub and goes to the off license to order “the usual”. He gets into his SUV to repark it. Behind him we see blue flashing lights. A policeman asks him if he can have a little chat.

Mark has just lost his license and must attend a MPU (medical-psychological examination) course. He swears that he has no problem with drink. In the daytime he is a functioning foreman on a building site, negotiating between the architects and builders. In the evening, he goes out drinking with a group of friends. At one such meeting, Mark reads out a survey by the health ministry. It turns out that, according to the survey, they are all alcoholics.

The film focuses closely on Mark so we learn little about the other attendees of the course. An older woman repeats the claim that she only drank two glasses of champagne. As the bloke taking the course reads out the 5 different types of alcoholic, a man, whose face shows that he’s no stranger to alcohol, says that he’s all of them. These are fine as individual gags, but does not present us with well-rounded characters.

One person we see a little more of is Helena, a primary school teacher. She joins forces with Mark and they help each other in the fight to overcome the booze. Unfortunately, Helena’s character is also woefully underwritten. She exists as a projection, someone who Mark can talk to and a possible love interest, but not really as a person in her own right. The moments in which she appears add a spark, but there are just not enough of these moments.

After a party, Mark stays over with his best friend Nadim, and Nadim’s partner (if she actually has a name, it wasn’t mentioned much. This is more a film for the boys). After first climbing into bed with the pair, Mark wakes up on a damp armchair, a family heirloom which the partner inherited by the gran. After witnessing Mark piss on his girlfriend’s prized chair, Nadim finally confronts his friend.

They make a bet. If Mark manages to stay sober until he can reapply for his driving license, Nadim must travel Berlin’s Circle Line naked. If he fails, he will do up Nadim’s hut in the woods for free. Mark starts a fitness regime and alcohol-free beer, but Helena warns him that it’s not as easy as he thinks. He’ll have 1 or 2 weeks of feeling good about himself – one month maximum. After that, the need to drink will return.

Frederick Lau has established himself as one of the most reliable actors of his generation, playing slightly blokey blokes who are respected by their friends despite their obvious manifold flaws. You might remember him as the love interest in Victoria, although he’s been delivering watchable performances for quite a while in films which don’t have Victoria’s class. Seeing him in the trailer was one of my motivations for seeing the film.

Lau plays drunk very well. It’s not just the stumbling and slurring, but also the occasional moments of lucidity.  In one scene, where an idea pops into Marc’s drunken head and he tries to articulate what makes perfect sense to him, the look on his face reminded me exactly of an old friend with whom I’ve spent far too many drunken evenings. You really believe that he’s off his face.

But he is not served well by a pedestrian script which, like many courses for alcoholics, is just too preachy. One for the Road misses what made Trainspotting such a great film. Trainspotting didn’t just show the degradation and squalour experienced by addicts. We also saw the fun and excitement, why they took heroin in the first place. By treating alcoholics merely as sad victims who need to be saved, this film fails to treat them with appropriate understanding.

I think that there’s a second problem, which is that Mark and Helena’s lives are a little too comfy. Helena lives in an apartment that most primary school teachers can only dream of. Mark, on the other hand, seems to have a job where you can take days off work without even having to fake a sickie. I guess this is all to show us how far alcoholics can fall, but the relative privilege of the characters made me feel less empathy for them.

Despite the great acting, you leave the cinema feeling that you’ve just watched a public information film. Too many characters are given speeches warning us of the dangers of alcohol, just in case we haven’t been paying attention. There is not enough fun in the film. There are individual comic scenes, sure, like when Mark falls asleep and burns his frozen pizza to a crisp, but they are not enough to avoid the feeling that we are being lectured to.

There are also few surprizes, and none in the sentimental ending. This is a film which sees alcoholism as a primarily individual problem, which can be solved by a surprisingly sympathetic boss telling you to respect yourself together with a big dollop of family. This misses the fact that bosses and family are two of the main reasons that many people turn to drink in the first place.

Nonetheless, the acting is first class, and Frederick Lau’s performances are never totally missable. If you go into the film with low enough expectations, you should find something in there to enjoy. But it’s not worth sacrificing a night out in the pub with your mates for.