Following on from his debut Show Me Love, Moodysson paints another affectionate and painfully funny portrait of Swedish life. Together focuses on the evolving political and sexual landscape of the mid-70s; the decade of Marxism, communal lifestyle and tolerance. After another drunken beating from her husband, housewife Elisabeth (Lisa Lindgren) packs her bags, takes the children and goes to live with her brother Goran (Gustaf Hammarsten). She arrives at a chaotic house inhabited by hippies who discuss radical politics, indulge in free love, grow their own vegetables and drink copious amounts of wine. It is the collision of these two worlds that drives the narrative, shaping it into a sugary metaphor for people just getting along together.
The script ambitiously introduces big themes (Communism, Vietnam, cultural coca-colonisation) and seeks to shoehorn them into the quirky, semi-bourgeois setting. Sometimes the gamble pays off handsomely; other times there is a curious sense of flatness, like a punchline that has been fluffed. This is no better illustrated than in the several discussions about lesbianism; sexual liberation here is played strictly for laughs. But on the whole, the film manages to fuse the serious and the comic, and its use of short, sharp scenes alternate cleverly with longer, drawn-out dinner table conversations.
The film is full of clever techniques - hypnotic overlapping editing, crash zooms (used a little too liberally), fades to red, eclectic use of music - which lend the film a deeper, more profound texture. Also interesting is the accentuated mise-en-scène; all things 70s seems a little too exaggerated (the fridge magnet colour schemes, ABBA, long beards, pictures of Che Guevara) but this arguably serves a key thematic purpose - the children deliberately reject these motifs ("this house is full of bad music and ugly clothes" says Eva), reinforcing Moodysson's thesis that the child-adult generation gap will forever be fraught with tension.
The performances are uniformly excellent, never straying into cliché or soap opera bathos. Michael Nyqvist is particularly strong as Elisabeth's husband Rolf and where Moodysson excels is in his sensitive direction of the child actors who bring a restless energy and sheer wide-eyed incomprehension to the proceedings. The scene when Tet (Axel Zuber) and Stefan (Sam Kessel) 'play Pinochet' is powerful, if only for the way in which a child's grasp of events is far closer to pinpointing what really goes on.
Moodysson's script may operate at a basic level (neatly underlined by Eva's comment "God, all adults are idiots"), but this doesn't prevent it from being insightful. Pithy maxims are also Moodysson's trademark - "porridge together is better than pork cutlets alone" may smack of superficiality, but is an aptly sentimental metaphor for Together's emotional and thematic scope.
When Ingmar Bergman labelled Show Me Love a 'young master's first masterpiece', Moodysson's follow-up picture was always likely to be closely scrutinised, but it succeeds through its lively quirkiness. In a film about escaping from loneliness and finding redemption in the bosom of the family, the game of football in the snow at the close does wrap things up a little too nicely (Elisabeth's and Rolf's reunion may or may not last, as may the marriage of the nosey neighbours). But tomorrow is another day in Together's framework. What matters is the here and now - whether that's the death of Franco or who's going to do the washing up.
Reviewed by Ben McCann
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