After the English-language outing of Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Vinterberg returns to his native Denmark for this occasionally engaging but largely disjointed drama.
Set in the early seventies, professor of architecture Erik (Thomsen), TV news anchor wife Anna (Dyrholm) and their fourteen-year-old daughter Freja (Wallstrom Hansen) are bequeathed a large house. Slightly bored of their marriage, Anna suggests they turn the house into a commune, inviting like-minded souls Ole (Lars Ranthe), Mona (Julie Agnete Vang), a couple (Anne Grie Henningsen and Rasmus Lind Rubin) and their ill son, and oddjobber Allon (Fares Fares) to share it with them. But when Erik embarks on an affair with student Emma (Helene Reingaard Neumann), Anna suggests he move her in…
The numerous narrative strands rarely come to fruition with the support characters merely a distraction, there to orbit the Erik-Anna-Freja-Emma dynamic. Hippy Mona and the shaggy Ole, who has a penchant for burning every possession that's lazily discarded about the house, don't have a lot to do. The couple's dynamics aren't explored (despite Ole's warning that she is a 'manipulative bitch') and their son's illness is belatedly used to tug at the heartstrings. The sensitive Allon, who breaks down crying when confronted with the slightest bit of criticism, seems to be there for comic relief only. Freja meanwhile enjoys a first love with a local boy but this doesn't develop.
The Commune is Vinterberg's slightest film in some time. It can be funny (Erik faints when he gets angry) and it's unpredictable, but all one can take from the film is Vinterberg's opinion that the idea of a commune, and probably by extent the hippy ideal, is just not achievable. Despite her attempts to take the news of the affair maturely, Anna can't help feeling jealous and it begins to affect her outgoing persona and her work. People, The Commune seems to say, aren’t supposed to live like this. "Love is on the decline in the world," someone says at one point.
It’s a pointed comment made softly and the performances are strong (especially Thomsen and Dyrholm) but The Commune is a world away from Vinterberg’s more difficult, and decidedly better films, Festen and The Hunt.