Institute History
Description
To follow his 1998 first feature film, the critically and commercially successful Show Me Love, Swedish screenwriter and director Lukas Moodysson moves from work tightly focused on two adolescent girls coming of age to the complex portrayal of life in a '70s commune. The large cast of characters—idealists and ideologues, gays, lesbians, conservative neighbors, children swept up in the group's social revolution, an abused mother and her immature husband, an elderly loner—is developed in rich and sympathetic detail.
The opposition that drives the story of Together is set early in the film in an intense but comically treated discussion of a fine point of sexual ideology when Goran, the commune's "leader," arrives with his sister Elisabeth and her two children who are seeking refuge from domestic violence. As Elisabeth discovers freedom and possibility, her new friends reluctantly discover the limits human nature imposes upon idealism. Experimentation with roles and relationships has left deeply strained emotions, and the "political correctness" of utopian beliefs has prevented those strains from showing. Tension is high, builds higher yet, and then explodes in a startling climax.
Moodysson's gifts for plot, storytelling, dialogue, and character development are brilliantly deployed in Together to weave a tapestry of multiple viewpoints of communal life. The result is an exquisitely choreographed film that is a chronicle of a peculiar time in our recent past and a portrayal of the timeless contradiction between social and individual needs.