Together Chides a Liberal Boomer Lifestyle; Tortilla Soup Is Indifferently Directed and Cheesy-Looking
Although it's set in a Swedish commune circa 1975 and basks in period details, the domestic comedy Together isn't nostalgic about that era?not at all. In its heart, the astute, funny movie from young Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson is deeply and intelligently conservative. Despite naturalistic performances and charmingly loose, handheld camerawork (cinematographer Ulf Brantas plays up the browns, reds and oranges, creating a womblike effect), the screenplay hovers on the edge of satire, scoring points without congratulating itself for scoring points. It invites us to grin and cringe as the hippie parents of commune children experiment with open marriage and fashionable lesbianism and attend family dinners without pants. It comes on like an anthropological comedy, then draws conclusions about the situations it puts on display; the conclusions are unflattering but generally fair, and I doubt anyone but the most diehard, stuck-in-the-Nixon-era liberal would disagree with them.
A true ensemble movie, Together takes us inside the commune whose name provides the movie's title. The adults in the film are middle-class twenty- and thirtysomethings who continued to cling to utopian "revolutionary" ideals long after the rest of the Western world had begun to abandon them. They believe their lifestyles in the 60s?sexual experimentation, casual drug use, free-form partying, vegetarianism, angry political activism, no tv?can and should continue, despite the fact that there are kids underfoot. Moodysson is 32, and while his own family was nothing like the extended clan of moral relativists depicted in Together, his sympathies are firmly with the children?as well they should be. The film's token Everyman is the bearded, soft-spoken Goran (Gustaf Hammarsten, so memorable in Ingmar Bergman's The Best Intentions), who seems as though he'd rather kill himself than admit disapproval of anyone else's behavior. He lives in the commune with his girlfriend, Lena (Anja Lundqvist), a flighty, cheerfully selfish young woman who kicks off the film's parade of bad choices by asking Goran's permission to sleep with another of the commune's inhabitants, the brooding political activist Erik (Olle Sarri). As Goran hears his girlfriend's request, he looks like a man who thinks he just swallowed a bug. This being a commune in the 70s, he grants permission anyway, even though (1) the very thought of Lena cheating breaks his heart, and (2) Lena's asking a man for permission is basically a nostalgic formality, this being a commune and all.
Lena's tryst with Erik is hot and loveless, and swathed in delusion. She thinks she's just exercising her freedom, and is unprepared by the strong feelings awakened by her physical relationship with Erik. Erik is a classic hard-on activist type, so devoted to his leafleting and impromptu lecturing (in one scene, he taunts a cop for being a cop) that he seems not to notice that Lena has fallen in love with him. The other inhabitants of the house aren't models of stability, either. Scruffily handsome med student Lasse (Ola Norell) is sharing the place with his ex-wife Anna (Jessica Liedberg), who left him to become a lesbian (the film's presskit knowingly puts the word "become" in quotes) and who acts as kind of an Eddie Haskell figure, urging everyone else in the house to stay up later, party harder and do wildly inappropriate things just to prove that patriarchal society has no power over them.
Lasse and Anna have an eight-year-old son named Tet (Axel Zuber), who has absorbed his parents' cliched political slogans and uses them casually, even when he's talking with other kids. Also in the mix: Klas (Shanti Roney), a young, elfin gay man who has his eye on Lasse and figures the goofball hetero will end up in his bed if he waits long enough. Into this tempest-tossed house comes Goran's sister Elisabeth (Lisa Lindgren), a status-quo suburban housewife escaping a marriage to a pathetic, abusive drunk. She moves into the commune with her two children, shy 10-year-old Stefan (Sam Kessel) and bespectacled 13-year-old Eva (Emma Samuelsson). Eva is so mortified by the behavior of her mom's new roommates?particularly Anna, who sets about seducing the new arrival?that she can barely stand to be in the same room with them.
Deep down, Eva already understands what the adults don't: There are reasons why family life has traditionally tried to honor certain rules of propriety, and when adults ignore those rules, kids suffer. This damaged, alienated girl is a bit like Heather Matarazzo's character in Welcome to the Dollhouse?but unlike the perpetually adolescent misanthrope Todd Solondz, Moodysson sees her as more person than punchline; he gives his heroine a bit of dignity and intelligence. Along with Goran, with whom she seems to share a wordless rapport, Anna serves as film's voice of reason (i.e., the filmmaker's mouthpiece). She doesn't understand the exact nature of the wrong that's being done to her and her brother, but she understands that it is wrong, and her attempts to put those instincts into words are alternately sad and inspiring. "We have ugly clothes and we listen to bad music," she says. No argument there.
The adults' selfishness is heartbreakingly silly?and sometimes just plain heartbreaking. The seeds of a great family?a new kind of family?exist in this commune. After a while, the inhabitants realize this, then take steps to preserve their uniqueness while laying down reasonable rules and standards. Moodysson's handheld camera caresses the warm interior of the house, emphasizing the jumbled, junky, lived-in hominess of the place; the script betrays a real appreciation for the transformative power of pop music (lots and lots of ABBA) and childhood stories (informed that Pippi Longstocking was a materialist stooge, Lasse chuckles and says, "Are you kidding? Pippi is fucking great!").
I realize I'm probably making this movie sound a lot more polemical than it really is. Together attacks fashionable leftist ideas of family?i.e., a family can be anything, and rules are optional?but it doesn't see them as a self-contained scourge, a demon worse than all others. Rather, it views the domestic revisionist shenanigans of the 60s generation as one more example of middle-class Western hipster selfishness?a phenomenon that encourages so-called "adventurous" young people to believe they're rebelling against conformity when what they're really doing is shirking their responsibilities as spouses and parents.
Moodysson elaborates on this idea in a subplot about Anna's friendship with a pudgy, bespectacled next door neighbor kid named Fredrik (Henrik Lundstrom). Fredrik's parents are trapped in an outwardly respectable but loveless marriage. (After spotting a glimpse of female skin through a commune window, Fredrik's dad excuses himself to go down into the basement to "do some woodwork"?and the wife's exasperated expression tells us she knows what that means and is trying very hard not to think about it.) They neglect their son as surely as the commune next door neglects its kids?but in a different way, a square way.
What's really going on in the Together house isn't revolution but neglect?arrested development posing as freedom. There are moments where the adults break through their myopic fog and reach out (clumsily) to the next generation; the most moving effort is made by Elisabeth's ex-husband, Rolf (Michael Nyqvist), a pitiful drunk who's still lucid enough to feel shame about what he's become. When an unexpected visitor arrives at his pigsty home and demands to talk to him, Rolf rouses himself from his hungover stupor and tries to clean up. It's a reflexive gesture of respect for himself and others?proof that there's a good, responsible person under that boozy facade, and maybe a decent father, too. He, also, is hiding from his responsibility as a parent.
Every adult in Moodysson's film is running from reality. Some characters choose fashionable lifestyle politics as their refuge; others choose the bottle; still others go into the basement to do their woodwork. The film admits that good things came out of the social upheavals of the 60s?a stronger sense of self-worth among women and minorities, an enhanced understanding of class conflict, a willingness to let married women work without being demonized. But while it avoids caricaturing any one person or institution, Together says the lifestyle experiments of bourgeois baby boomers were a disaster from which their children were lucky to escape.