Cameron Birnie uncovers some dusty classics and hidden gems from the local video store.
'If you're not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative at forty, you have no brain', claimed the quotable conservative Winston Churchill.
In Together (2000), Lucas Moodysson's perfectly pitched ode to communal living in Sweden a decade after the swinging sixties, Churchill's aphorism is put to the test in a variety of ways.
The opening scene sets the tone with gusto.
Goran (Gustav Hammarsten) is listening to the radio and hears the announcement that Spanish dictator Francisco Franco has died of a coronary arrest.
He runs into the living area proclaiming the good news, and the commune's members react like it is V-Day, hugging, kissing, dancing and jumping in the air.
Watching five-year old Tet (named after the Offensive) chant ‘Franco is dead' as though it were a schoolyard rhyme is the first of the film's many laugh-out-loud moments.
‘Together' is the name of the commune itself. It is scrawled in block letters on the side of the psychedelic Morris Minor van the house's motley crew use to get to... wherever it is that they go during the day (the film, in a subtly evasive move, never makes this entirely clear).
There is Goran, a cuddly teddy bear of a man who is in an open relationship with Lena (Anja Lundqvist).
He is also a sort of biblical Job-figure, too sweet natured to tell Lena that his emotions are having trouble catching up to his political ideals as he listens to her have an obnoxiously high-volume orgasm with Erik (Olle Sarri) in the room next door.
Erik is a tightly-wound politico who has disowned his banker father and will only have sex with Lena on the proviso that she discuss Marxist-Leninist politics with him afterwards.
Then there is the cynical Lasse (Ola Norell) who suspects that his ex-wife Anna (Jessica Liedberg) has become a lesbian largely to spite him, and Klas (Shanti Roney) the love-starved gay flatmate who is trying to use brute logic to convince heterosexual Lasse that it would be irrational for them not to have sex.
The fragile equilibrium of the commune is thrown into disarray when Goran's middle class sister Elizabeth (Lisa Lindgren) moves into the house with her dysfunctional children Eva (Emma Samuelsson) and Stefan (Sam Kessel) after being hit by her husband Rolf (Michael Nyqvist).
The way that the conventional family and the unconventional communards interact and adapt to one another makes for riveting watching, partly because of Moodysson's refusal to allow his characters to devolve into types.
They each gain depth with every scene that they are in and they are as refreshingly unpredictable as real human beings.
All of the performances are superb, with a freshness and spontaneity that seems appropriate to the tone of the film, and Moodysson elicits especially remarkable work from the child actors.
He made his fame with Show me Love, which was about a teenage lesbian love affair and became Sweden's highest ever grossing movie, and once again here the children form the heart of the film, whether it's Eva's desperate craving for adulthood in the face of the grown-ups' attempts to revert back to childish innocence or the budding friendship between Stefan and Tet, who hilariously play a game called ‘Pinochet', in which they pretend to elicit confessions by torturing one another with electrodes, and protest with placards demanding that their vegetarian elders allow them to eat hot dogs.
The film has been criticised by some on the left for its supposedly conservative sub-text - the dynamics of the house begin to stabilise once meat and television are introduced, for instance, and when Erik runs off to join the Baader-Meinhof gang.
Perhaps they expected something a little more incendiary from the man who accepted his award for best picture for Show Me Love at the Swedish national film awards by lambasting the wealthy audience for not paying taxes and eating too much meat and left the stage, amidst a chorus of boos, with a one finger salute...
On balance though, if Moodysson is taking a position here, it is a humanistic and optimistic one.
One suspects that he would agree somewhat with the woolly monologue Goran delivers to Elizabeth's children about how community is like porridge (lonely oats transcending their isolation and joining together to form a warm, runny, glorious breakfast staple).
This film is about the real possibility of community and the compromise and capacity for change that is necessary in order to achieve it.
So forget Winston Churchill's crude Lib/Tory dichotomy...
Together is a film with a heart and a brain.
