Another Round - The right to 'dance like nobody's watching'

'Dance like nobody's watching'. I may well wince at that phrase's ubiquity, but it's been resonating rather a lot lately. It sprung to mind last week when I took in Abel Ferrara's latest film Siberia, a gloomy, fever-dream that finds Willem Dafoe taking stock of his life amidst the snowy Arctic wastes. I loved the huskies and the shots of the harsh, unforgiving wilderness, but the film as a whole was underwhelming and obfuscating, a self-indulgent shrug from an occasionally great director. One scene, though, caused me to sit up and pay extra attention as Dafoe's snowy castaway broke into a chest-beating dad-dance to Del Shannon's 'Runaway'.

I've got a real soft-spot for Dafoe. He's the star of my 'favourite not very good film' (we've all got one of these, no?), the little known Light Sleeper, and his ridiculously angular cheekbones and a gaze that fluctuates effortlessly between childlike wonder and haunting menace, means I'd watch him in almost anything. And, indeed, whilst his dance makes Ferrara's Siberia stick in the mind, it got me thinking of other films – much better films – that employ an incongruous, unexpected dance routine.

Huskies and Del Shannon

Or rather, one particular film, that raises the bar of this trope – I'm calling it as a trope – to a dizzyingly high level, Thomas Vinterberg's moving and quietly magnificent Another Round. The story of four high school teachers  who consume alcohol on a daily basis to see how it impacts upon their social and professional lives – experimenting and trying to ascertain the perfect quantity that will add the necessary charisma, enthusiasm, and fun with which to ward off a creeping midlife ennui – should really be a boorish, ridiculous mess. It so isn't though.  

Mads Mikkelsen - a cut above Strictly

A mixture of the comic and the tragic – and the beautiful Shakespearean interchangeability of those two moods – its finale involves perhaps the greatest and most ecstatic double-take that you are likely to see in a cinema or on your television screen. Martin - played brilliantly and lugubriously by the Danish Dafoe Mads Mikkelsen - suddenly breaking out into a quayside dance routine at his pupils' graduation celebrations is simply joyous. It's the type of moment that makes you realise how much you miss the cinema, that both-ways side-glance that you throw out at a genuinely 'Oh my God' moment, making sure that everyone else is registering just what you are seeing. In fact, with Another Round, I would guarantee that the reaction would have been audible: oohs and ahhs, and that gentle, genuine laughter, unaffected giggles, that can accompany great cinematic moments. 

Why do Danish kids dress up as sailors at graduation?

I almost hesitate to share the clip here, because – unlike with Siberia - it is hard earned. The almost two hours that precede build up to and create a crescendo that is Shostakovichesque in its release from bleakness. It is a stunning moment of catharsis as the shackles of middle-aged despair and its attendant chains are temporarily shaken off 'like dew'. It is cinema that makes you smile, even when the subject is people at their lowest ebb.