Together
Lukas Moodysson, Sweden, 2000o
Sweden in 1975: a shared house full of long-haired, politically aware, sexually progressive young people who want to live a self-determined and collectivist life at the same time. They eat a vegetarian diet, drink lots of red wine, forbid the kids coca-cola and differentiate between social democratic and socialist ... One day, the good-natured Göran's sister and her children flee their middle-class marriage for the shared flat - a new element in the daily hullabaloo.
With the enchanting lesbian teenage story Fucking Åmål, the Swede Lukas Moodysson entered the Scandinavian auteur cinema scene in 1998, which at the time was causing a furore with Danish newcomers such as Thomas Vinterberg and Susanne Bier. Two years later, Moodysson followed up with the comedy Together (Tillsammans), which is being relaunched on the occasion of the sequel film Together 99. Set in a 1975 hippie flat share, it tells the humorous and affectionate story of the young idealists of the time who try out new ways of living together, wanting only the best - and causing some emotional damage in the process. At the centre are the good-natured Göran and his sister Elisabeth, who escapes from a failing middle-class marriage into the shared flat, but each of the ten or so adult characters is drawn with the same mischievousness, while the secret heroes are the children. They deal with their parents' mess and grow beyond themselves in the process. Moodysson's sympathetic view comes at just the right time in our era of hardened fronts between collectivist wokeness and individualistic egocult. He reminds us that the alternative to communal madness and confusion is loneliness and, with a triumphant final sequence, transforms the latter into the strengthening of old alliances and the formation of new ones.
Andreas Furler