The Com­mune

You might chalk up Thomas Vin­ter­berg as one of mod­ern cinema’s most con­sis­tent­ly under­achiev­ing direc­tors. He still is and, at this rate, will for­ev­er be known as the mak­er of 1998’s Fes­ten, per­haps the glass jew­el in the plas­tic crown of the Dogme 95 move­ment. With his lat­est, The Com­mune, he deliv­ers anoth­er almost-but-not-quite effort, mov­ing back to Den­mark after one of his occa­sion­al for­ays into the Eng­lish lan­guage with an under­pow­ered, cof­fee-table take on Thomas Hardy’s ​‘Far From the Madding Crowd’.

It sees an afflu­ent cou­ple, Ulrich Thomsen’s Erik and Trine Dyrholm’s Anna, decid­ed to start a com­mune in the grand old house inher­it­ed by the former’s father as a way to inject some fun back into their stalling rela­tion­ship. Their daugh­ter Fre­ja (Martha Sofie Wall­strøm Hansen) seems con­tent if hard­ly over­joyed with this mid-life social exper­i­ment, more wor­ried by the fact that her par­ents mar­riage is in dire need of such a boost.

The first half of the film charts the cre­ation of this home­spun form of democ­ra­cy as a diverse array of house­mates are vet­ted and then allowed through the door. The frothy tone comes as expect­ed, as the plot latch­es on to the pet­ty squab­bles and minor rifts that come from com­mu­nal life. The lib­er­al liv­ing arrange­ment instills a new­found sense of adven­ture in the co-habitees, not least the usu­al­ly uptight Erik who falls in love with one of his archi­tec­ture stu­dents (Helene Rein­gaard Neumann’s Emma). He mocks her fond­ness for the ultra-func­tion­al build­ing style of Le Cor­busier, and they share a stolen kiss in his office. Slow­ly, the film stops from being about the com­mune itself, and moves on to ques­tion­ing how this kind of alter­na­tive liv­ing arrange­ment can effect atti­tudes to rela­tion­ships and tra­di­tion­al notions of family.

Yet, the light and fluffy The Com­mune of the first half is far more palat­able than the dark and intro­spec­tive The Com­mune that arrives in the film’s shouty sec­ond half. Cred­it where credit’s due to writ­ers Tobias Lind­holm and Vin­ter­berg – they do real­ly cap­ture the shrill, irri­tat­ing and labo­ri­ous expe­ri­ence of liv­ing with a lot of oth­er peo­ple, but that is unfor­tu­nate­ly to the detri­ment of film itself. The sup­port­ing cast don’t ever evolve beyond sin­gle-trait ciphers, and the relent­less, dewy-eyed bit­ter­sweet­ness of the whole thing ends up test­ing the patience. Plus, there already exists a far, far supe­ri­or ver­sion of this sto­ry in Lukas Moodysson’s Togeth­er from 2000. You’d do well to seek that out instead.