Together
April 19 - 22, 7 & 9 p.m.
Metro Cinema
Zeidler Hall, Citadel Theatre
**** (out of five)

Lukas Moodysson’s film is called Together (Tillsamanns), but his characters are anything but. In his second cinematic offering (after 1998’s Show Me Love), the Swedish writer and director has once again shown that he is a master of subtle storytelling and delicate character development. He has convincingly recreated the twilight years of the 20th century’s most influential era.

It’s 1975: the ideological foundation laid by the free-lovin’ late ’60s is beginning to crumble, making way for the economic roller-coaster of the 1980s. Together is the name of a slovenly commune in suburban Stockholm where chaos reigns. It’s a ramshackle house, reminiscent of a garishly painted rabbit warren, where every corner is clogged by a warm and often drunk body or a beaded velveteen floor cushion. The exasperatingly passive Göran (Gustav Hammarsten) heads the motley household whose members would rather argue over the bourgeois implications of washing dishes than scrub the pots and pans.

Moodysson’s intuitive script captures left-wing zealotry at its finest. Participants are so busy defending their ideological standpoint they’ve forgotten to question the logic or practicality of their choices. Anna (Jessica Liedberg) rebels against patriarchal society by splitting with husband Lasse (Ola Norell) and becoming a homosexual. Yet her lesbian exploits seem limited to didactics and unshaven armpits.

In theory, Göran and his narcissistic partner Lena (Anja Lundqvist) embrace their "open" relationship, but the idea begins to chafe when Göran lies awake listening to Lena vigorously bouncing bedsprings in the next room. To further exacerbate the tense living conditions, Göran’s older sister Elisabeth (Lisa Lindgren) and her two children, awkward Eva (Emma Samuelsson) and angry Stefan (Sam Kessel) arrive seeking shelter from her drunk and disorderly husband Rolf (Michael Nyqvist). She throws her middle-class values – is eating meat really so terrible? – into the melting pot and things begin to boil over.

The communal ideal flourishes in at least one area: Together has no star characters. Instead we are offered a panorama of uniquely flawed relationships each imbued with enough personality to be poignant and credible.

As in Show Me Love, Moodysson portrayed phenomenal understanding of young people. Perhaps this film’s most memorable relationship is between 13-year-old Eva and Fredrik (Henrik Lundstrom), the pudgy boy from the conservative family next door. The discovery that they share identical eyeglass prescriptions becomes a binding force between them, and together they reject the radical freedoms of her house and the ideological rigidity of his.

Together is a heartwarming film that explores the best and the worst of the free-love lifestyle. Moodysson has created realistic people struggling between their ideals and the lure of commercial society. He mocks much of the hippies’ utopian quest but does it with absolute tenderness, all the while subtly reminding us that despite much of their over-the-top flakiness, the hippie culture brought about more social changes than any era in the last century.