Tillsammans (Together) (Swe 2000)

"Elisabeth tires of her husband, so she packs her bags, takes her children and goes off to her brother, Goran. The year is 1975. Elisabeth is a fairly ordinary housewife from the suburbs, but Goran is a little different. He lives in a commune and that's where Elisabeth arrives with her children to a chaotic house inhabited with long-haired people who discuss politics, have free sex, grow vegetables and drink lots of red wine. The collision of these two separate worlds sets off a drama that will change all their lives."

i'll get straight to the point:

moodyson taking a thoughroughly disappointing look at a commune in 1975 sweden, when dreaming was apparently just being rendered illicit again. if such melancholy rides are questionable territory per se, this movie is an interesting case of how the contemporary mood of hopelessness finds expression in bourgeois artistic fashion. "looking back at those over-the-top years- weren't we so wild, so naive back then!" of course, we know that this mood of necrophilia (no life before death) is induced by cultural managers. such as this guy. as our swedish sources correctly point out, moodyson is producing visuals for the conservative classes of sweden. his film is therefore a hymn of shallow harmony, in tune with the limited scale of lived emotion our current regressive post-pop-regime allows for.

why was i so displeased?

the characters, which are all quite impressively done, never manage to escape the frigid bourgeois behavioural frame. this reduces the most recent crack at the people making history (cf zinn) to a meaningless language game, with radical discourse being portrayed as a vacuous speech bubble that does not find any manifestation in the daily ongoings of communal life. apart from shaving armpits/not shaving armpits type lifestyle decisions, in terms of liberation, we get two characters discovering their homosexuality. "thanks god we're free honey". both "conversions" are portrayed as being due to seduction. this i find deeply questionable.

in terms of heterosexual liberation, we've got one female who is sleeping with two characters in turns- apparently there aren't enough females but plenty of gay males around. character a, soft-hearted, lovely goran, is deeply in love with this "slag from hell", and has to endure loud noises ("mama! uuuuh!") as she's repeatedly having intercourse with Eric, the commune's "angry communist" (official web page). she then feels compelled to inform goran just how special fucking with eric is. which is of course upsetting to romantic goran. the only possible reading on this seems to be a) it was after all Eve's fault, it must have been that damn apple! b) sea gulls have monogamic relationships, therefore humans should too, otherwise we all end up getting hurt. "poor sweet goran, being denied possessive 'love'!"

and that really is as far as it goes- it's freedom's lot, i'm afraid.

Eric launches a lonely project at liberating one of stockholm's palaces by debating the issue with the palace guard ("don't you think there should be apartments here?"), before leaving the commune to join baader-meinhof. ts ts ts- we all know what they got up to. goran kicks out "eve" in a one-off fit of rage. some other people leave. "get with it- back to reality" sobering disintegration feel. the kids protest the vegetarian regime and it is decided per show of hands that they should be allowed hot dogs. they also secretly play with the toy guns they aren't allowed, as this is apparently so deeply in tune with human nature. a tv is introduced "for the kids". the whole commune ends up in front of it with big pleased smiles on their faces, watching some idiocy-guaranteed tele-tubby type programme. the film's main character, a woman who's fled her alcoholic husband with her kids, returns to his (reformed) arms in the end, big group hug, no drama, no lives changed, film ends on abba's "S.O.S.":

Where are those happy days, they seem so hard to find
I tried to reach for you, but you have closed your mind
Whatever happened to our love
I wish I understood
It used to be so nice, it used to be so good
etc..

Moodyson re: abba: "they came from sweden and wanted to be an international brand. so do i."

phil's quick capsule review: piece of shit