Communing About Pitfalls of ‘Correct’ Thought

Swedish director Lukas Moodysson scans the atrium of a slick TriBeCa hotel and, rather than comment on how cool it is, says, “I think those railings are too low for children.” Moodysson finds the frigid air-conditioning unhealthy too.

He’s not being a killjoy, however. He knows better than to be that. In fact, his new film, “Together,” set in a mid-1970s Swedish commune, is all about the pitfalls of correct thinking, political and otherwise.

“I really wanted to tell something about the fundamentalists of the world,” Moodysson says of his film--which opens today in Los Angeles--but also alluding to the rock throwers at the recent summit of world leaders in Italy. “There is a rigidity and a fundamentalism in the left movement today, as there was in the ‘70s. I think that’s one of the big problems of all the alternative cultures in the world, that they build their own rules and systems and don’t allow normal average people and their opinions in, and that makes them much weaker and gives them less opportunity to change the world.”

If this description makes “Together” sound like a polemic, rest easy--it’s not.

It deftly, and hilariously, explores the gap between what people “should” think and feel and what they really think and feel, and how they embrace or manipulate left-wing tenets, like free love, to serve selfish ends. The world depicted in “Together” is a messy one, one that’s ripe for satire.

For example, Goran, the bearded, pacifist peacemaker in the commune, allows his girlfriend to sleep with another commune member, even though it’s killing him. Goran’s bourgeois sister, Elisabeth, escaping from her abusive husband, arrives with two kids in tow, and many of the supposedly loving and accepting household members are upset.

One communalist, Anna, has divorced another, Lasse, to become a lesbian, almost as if it were a fashion statement. Their son is named Tet, after the 1968 Vietnamese Tet Offensive. In this household, there is no television, no meat and no Pippi Longstocking (she’s a fascist.) There is, however, plenty of red wine and bickering over who should do the dishes.

The real victims of this anarchy are not so much the adults as the children. There’s one disturbing scene, which set some the movie’s financiers’ teeth on edge, in which Goran’s girlfriend exposes herself to a neighborhood boy. If this had been an American movie, it would have been the occasion of a humiliatingly “funny” sexual encounter. Instead, the boy turns away from the woman in fear and disgust. This honest response reveals such situations for what they often are: a form of abuse.

“I think it’s a scene that’s important for the film,” says Moodysson, who has two young children. “It has something to do with what people I know have talked about, the fact that there was inside this alternative culture a problem with grown-ups having children too close to sexual situations. I know so many people who had experiences waking up in the middle of the night and some people were having sex in their room, at a party or something.”

Originally children were going to factor very little in the film. In fact, as initially conceived, “Together” was much more sprawling, with many more characters and story lines. But Moodysson ruthlessly pared away characters and rearranged scenes. In the process, the children, who were supposed to be tucked away in a corner, came to the fore, in part because the material demanded it, in part because the director related to what they were going through.

Like the kids in the film, Moodysson is a product of a broken home. He came of age during the ‘70s, and though he was not in a commune, he did pick up on the decade’s music and mores. He first came to prominence in Sweden as a writer, publishing six books of poetry and a novel. But he didn’t make any money at it and worked at a series of dead-end jobs.

Turning to film, he attended film school in Stockholm and later released his first movie, “Show Me Love,” a highly regarded comedy about teenage lesbians. It was so highly regarded that Moodysson immediately undertook “Together” to get out from underneath the publicity.

For better or worse, “Together” has generated more publicity, some of it misguided. One otherwise glowing review noted that such left-leaning characters would never have listened to ABBA, the famously saccharine Swedish pop group of the period. In fact, they don’t--their music is on the soundtrack, not in the air.

“They were extremely hated [by left-wing people],” Moodysson says of ABBA. “It’s a very political thing to put an ABBA song in this context in Sweden. What happens in the film is when the commune opens themselves to the surrounding world, they also open themselves to ABBA music.”

Moodysson talks about a kind of schizophrenia that develops when people deny their own desires. . He says he talked to communalists of the period who said they would adhere to a vegetarian diet while in the commune and then order sausages and steaks when they went out.

This schizophrenia holds true for Sweden’s relationship to America, both then and now. Moodysson says he tried to find Swedish political music of ‘70s that the characters could dance to, but it was undanceable. Former communalists grudgingly admit that when they wanted to have fun, they would haul out their Janis Joplin and Rolling Stones records.

“The politically correct thing to say in a commune like this in 1975 would be that the U.S. is really the root of evil in the world and the home of capitalism,” Moodysson says. “It’s true now as well. But America is also the root of so much of the wonderful culture of the world. There’s so much wonderful music coming from America, from gospel music to hip-hop. There are so many good things coming from America and at the same time, in my opinion, so many bad things as well.”

Of course, many foreigners feel that American culture, especially American movies, is evil too, threatening to flatten everything in its path. Already Hollywood has apparently tried to co-opt Moodysson, approaching him to make what he calls a “Tarantino rip-off” partly set in Sweden. He was not interested, though he is interested in making a movie about American social issues, like the health-care system, which would seem about as compelling as a position paper. Another topic he’d like to tackle sounds more intriguing: pornography.

“I know many people who are opposed to pornography and have very feminist opinions,” Moodysson says. “But I’m quite sure that they sometimes feel it’s very nice to look at naked women. I think it’s OK to be against pornography, but you have to allow yourself sometimes to say, ‘OK, I’m not 100% perfect.”’