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dir. Lukas Moodysson, 2000 (review by Jon Horne 2001) © Touch Nottingham (internet magazine and What's On guide)
'Together' is a coming-of-age story, which has as its basis the power of friendship and human relations ('Togetherness', naturally) over abstract principles. This could have made the film hopelessly sentimental. As in his previous feature, 'F***ing Amal' (a.k.a. 'Show Me Love'), writer/director Lukas Moodysson claims to combine "American lightness with European gravity" in his work. However this film really does the opposite, combining American professionalism (whilst lightening the American slushiness) with European archness and unforced comedy. The result has an atmosphere more common in Australian cinema than in anything from Europe or America. Anyone who enjoyed 'Muriel's Wedding' or 'The Dish' will love this film. Moodysson's great achievement is to create real warmth in a story about characters who are so difficult to like. Much of the credit for this must go to the naturalism of the acting. 'Together' is very much a film of our time: Voyeurism is no longer This Year's Thing; it is an accepted part of the culture, with 'Big Brother' and other Reality-television programmes drawing huge audiences (even more so in Sweden, where their version of 'Survivor' drew an audience of over half the population, and the resulting media spotlight drove one of the losing contestants to suicide). As such, it is quite natural to be interested in the petty squabbles of people who are crammed together in a small house. Reality-television is at its most compelling when the participants are torn between acting (for the cameras, or for each other), and being themselves. The same dilemma drives the characters in this story - the conflict between being who they are, and acting in the way that their principles tell them to act. This is what makes 'Together' such an interesting and funny film - and being fiction, it is a lot more entertaining to watch than 'reality'. Small symbols become hugely powerful. A game of football in the back yard, to a soundtrack of 'S.O.S.' becomes emblematic of everything in western society which the characters were too quick to reject. Indeed, Lukas Moodysson (in this month's Uncut magazine) gives himself a personal award for 'the best use of Abba in a film', for just this scene - and he is quite right to do so. Music is an integral part of 'Together'. The hardcore members of the commune reject all music (along with pretty much everything else) and live in self-righteous silence; those who are committed to the life, but are open to the outside world, listen to terribly earnest late-60s singer-songwriters; while Elisabeth naively rocks out to Nazareth's massacre of 'Love Hurts' - a precursor to all the unspeakable 1980s power-ballads which you know she will still be listening to. Of course, a lot of the humour in the music gets lost in translation: these songs must have been hits in Sweden, and the domestic audience will have a far better idea than us of what the songs represent culturally (just as, for example, we get an idea of where the characters in 'High Fidelity' stand, from the lists they make). Music is not the only thing which gets lost in translation. There were a few speeches in the film which only merited a couple of lines of subtitles, when clearly a lot more was being said. Most obviously (because I happened to notice it): when Erik eventually leaves the commune, he tells his colleagues that he is going away to join the Baader-Meinhof Group (for younger readers, that means he is going to become an urban terrorist) - whereas the subtitles just say: "I'm going away." Drugs are conspicuous by their absence. A lot of red wine is drunk during the film, and some of the roll-ups that people smoke might be joints, but there seems to have been a deliberate policy on Moodysson's part to ignore the chemical influence upon the society he is portraying. The initial self-centredness and insensitivity of the commune members looks very much like the behaviour of people who are stoned all the time, but you can't be sure. The basic legality of the commune also makes the outside hostility (from curtain-twitching neighbours, and later from Elisabeth's estranged husband Rolf) less threatening, and rather less interesting than it could have been. Then again, commune life may well have been like that - in Sweden at least. I must recommend this film. If you are completely cynical, you might find the comedy too gentle, and the plot too cosily resolved. Given the current media-created climate of relentless nostalgia, you might also wonder why some minor celebrity isn't droning on in the background about how silly-yet-superior everything was in, y'know, the seventies. But this is not a film about 'the seventies'; it is film about people, what they get up to, and why. Go and see it. Released 13th July 2001 in London See it in Nottingham at the Broadway from 3rd August (to be confirmed) Links: 'Together' on the Internet Movie Database Lukas Moodysson on the Internet Movie Database - - - read more rants and raves |
