So Happy Together

By the mid-1970s, the American hippie movement had begun its transition from idealistic innocence to disco-influenced apathy. Not so in Sweden, where the idealism behind sex, drugs and rock and roll had not yet degenerated to three-somes, cocaine and leisure suits. Luke Moodysson, director of 1998’s well-received Show Me Love, tells the story of the Swedish commune Tillsammans, whose members are trying to piece their ideals into a life, until the arrival of one of the member’s bourgeois sister and her two reluctant children disrupts their routine.

At first, Together appears to be a collection of cardboard cutouts demonstrating the falseness of leftist ideals and the hypocrisy of their self-superiority. Certainly not everyone there is happy together: We first see communers arguing about who will do the dishes and whether or not Anna (Jessica Liedberg) can go bottomless in the kitchen. Moodysson, however, goes a step farther and we soon see that they are not hypocrites, but merely people trying to live by unattainable ideals and failing to account for their own humanity: Anna has become a lesbian for political reasons and her ex-husband Lasse (Ola Norell) cannot accept it, no matter what he believes. Goran (Gustaf Hammarsten), the film’s emotional center, cannot accept his open relationship with his self-absorbed girlfriend (Anja Lundqvist) Lena, not because he is bourgeois, but because she’s having noisy sex in the next room—and telling him about it. We soon realize these people are no better or worse than the rest of us; they are merely people.

The arrival of Goran’s sister Elisabeth (Lisa Lindgren), fleeing her alcoholic husband, disrupts their uneasy routine. Soon, she stops shaving her underarms and questions why her daughter has pink sheets and her son blue. Meanwhile her son, Stefan (Sam Kessel), has introduced Anna’s son Tet (named for the Vietnam war offensive) to the joys of plastic toys. It is worth the price of admission alone to see this child, raised in a peace-loving commune, pretend to torture another child with electrodes—for fun—and it is a tribute to both the children’s skills as actors and Moodysson’s skill as a director that the scene ends up funny, not sad.

In the end, just as the commune’s members force Elizabeth to question her routine, she forces them to question theirs. Would a television really be so terrible? Is children’s heroine Pippi Longstocking really a bourgeois capitalist? And if so, does it matter so much? By the time Stefan and Tet start picketing for hot dogs, we feel their pain: No one can live off of chickpeas forever. Elizabeth, with her cheesy music and relatively conventional wisdom, has forced her new friends to think not about what should make them happy, but what does make them happy. Perhaps her greatest influence is in forcing her brother to confront his rapidly degenerating relationship with Lena, a confrontation that climaxes with a rapid, noisy, raucous scene that is one of the film’s highlights.

Ultimately, the film is about relationships, their formation and dissolution. The most touching of these is between Eva (Emma Samuelsson), Elisabeth’s 13 year-old daughter, and Frederik (Henrik Lundstrom), the son of the very bourgeois family across the street. They first bond over having exactly the same glasses prescription and grow closer over what they share: both are outcasts, both just want to belong, both believe, as Eva states, that “all adults are stupid.” The film succeeds because it allows them to think that and does not force them to choose between equally inadequate ideologies. It refuses to turn its characters into clichés and refuses to indoctrinate the viewer with its “message.”

Without giving too much of the ending away, I can say that Together manages to stay touching, while steering clear of heartwarming predictability; the film condemns no one, not the selfish Lena, not Rolf, Elisabeth’s alcoholic husband; not even Frederick’s supremely bourgeois mother. The film tells a story about real people, stumbling through life, and the movie knows what the characters eventually learn: that one cannot be happy living behind the rigid walls of idealism. It is to the film’s credit that it never tells us how things should be, but rather how things are. Maybe the characters aren’t perfect. Maybe their relationships aren’t perfect. But they survive because, as one minor character puts it, “the only thing worth anything is being together.”