Kollektivet
Thomas Vinterberg (2016)
The central characters of The Commune, set in Copenhagen in the 1970s, are Erik (Ulrich Thomsen), a university lecturer in architecture, and his wife Anna (Trine Dyrholm), a newsreader on Danish television. The couple, who are in their forties, have one child, fourteen-year-old Freja (Martha Sofie Wallstrøm Hansen). Erik inherits a house from his late father, from whom he’d been estranged for years. He, Anna and Freja look round the property, which Erik pronounces much too big for the three of them, claiming that research studies have shown that empty rooms aren’t conducive to happy families. His and Anna’s financial situation isn’t great (it isn’t explained why) and Erik wants to instruct his lawyer (Jacob Højlev Jørgensen) to sell the house. Anna has other ideas. She suggests that small spaces can breed small minds: she tells Erik she still loves him but she now feels whatever he has to say she’s heard before. In spite of her presumably buzzy working environment, Anna craves the stimulus of other people in her life – exciting, ‘fantastic’ (her word) people. She wants to set up a commune. Erik rejects the idea but Anna goes ahead with contacting the couple’s life-and-soul-of-the-party friend Ole (Lars Ranthe) – the start of a process that results in a change of mind on Erik’s part and the commune taking shape. As well as the humorous fainéant Ole, there’s another couple, Steffen (Magnus Millang) and Ditte (Anne Gry Henningsen), and their seven-year-old son Vilads (Sebastian Grønnegaard Milbrat); Mona (Julie Agnete Vang), who’s single but has boyfriends; and Allon (Fares Fares), a shy and impoverished immigrant. Erik is won over to the new set-up to such an extent that he arranges with his lawyer for the other residents to become joint owners of the house. All seems well in the commune until Erik starts an affair with one of his students, twenty-three-year-old Emma (Helene Reingaard Neumann).
The Commune has been adapted, by Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm (writer-director of A Hijacking and A War), from Vinterberg’s stage play. I would guess the play’s action is concentrated on the commune’s habitation; if so, the theatre piece may be dramatically tauter than this film is. Vinterberg’s and Lindholm’s opening out of the material, to include sequences at the university where Erik teaches and the television studios where Anna works, not only dilutes the tension that a single-set drama is potentially well equipped to generate. It also exposes the story as a conventional marital-crisis drama. The domestic setting of the commune, although it’s distinctive, is essentially secondary. The first fifteen minutes set things up economically and nimbly – the sequence of short scenes that introduce each prospective communard is particularly enjoyable. But these people are then given virtually nothing to do. In most cases, even what we’re told about them at the outset is asserted rather than illustrated. We never get to see why the amusing rogue Ole might be good company for an evening but a pain to live with. Allon’s sole characteristic is a propensity for tears that you’re meant not to expect in a tall, swarthy man. Ditte is said to be controlling bitch but the evidence for this remains invisible – as do Mona’s men. Unless she’s meant to be a working prostitute on commune premises, I was never sure that anyone in the household other than Erik and Anna had a job. If all the others are unemployed, it’s not clear either how they spend their days or why their inactivity isn’t resented by their hard-working hosts.
In other words, you expect Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm to create drama or mine comedy throughout the commune. We occasionally watch them in committee: there’s discussion and a show of hands on the question of Erik’s mistress moving in; the meeting then proceeds to the next and no less controversial agenda item, whether to acquire a dishwasher. Except for these sequences and the heart condition of the little boy Vilads (see below), the film concentrates on the Anna-Erik-Emma triangle and Freja’s first sexual experiences, with a boy called Peter (Rasmus Lind Rubin). In a lecture, Erik excoriates one of his students, Jesper (Mads Reuther), for wanting to do an architecture project on tepees. During Erik’s tirade, Vinterberg cuts more than once to another student in the class; from the moment he does so, it’s obvious this beautiful girl is going to play a bigger role in the story. Within a couple of screen minutes, Emma is in Erik’s office, initially protesting at the way he treated Jesper but very soon making a play for her tutor. The more extensive scenes at the television studios are similarly clichéd. As Erik’s affair with Emma develops, Anna starts to fall apart. She gazes fearfully at her aging reflection in her dressing-room mirror. She snaps out of her depression, like the professional she is, to present a smiling face to the TV audience as the news goes on air. In due course, she’s in such a state of emotional collapse that the studio director, also at the last moment, has to pull the plug on transmission. After a while, you know there’s bound to be a shot of Anna newsreading on an unwatched television in a room where two people are having sex. (When the shot arrives, it turns out to be Freja and Peter rather than Emma and Erik.)
The second half of The Commune is structured purely in order for Trine Dyrholm to give Anna’s misery the works. She does it splendidly: Dyrholm is a fine actress and it’s good to see her expressing a range of vulnerability beyond what’s possible with the character she plays so entertainingly in the excellent television drama The Legacy. You’re always aware, though, of the mechanics at work in focusing attention on Anna – and it’s frustrating not to get more of the other actors, especially the vividly funny Lars Ranthe. Even the character of Erik is underwritten. What persuades him to change his mind so wholeheartedly about the commune that he’s prepared to relinquish sole ownership of the house? Of course it’s essential, in terms of the plot, that he does this but Vinterberg and Lindholm don’t supply Erik with any convincing motivation. Although we see that he resents having to raise his voice to get it heard above others in the commune, Erik doesn’t use this as an excuse for his developing a new relationship outside the group. We never get an idea of how the others’ feelings about Erik and Anna, whom several of the commune members have known for years, influence their view of Erik’s affair with Emma.
His congenital coronary condition has left the child Vilads with a limited life expectancy, or so he keeps telling those in the commune – Freja, Mona,Emma – whom he propositions. Sebastian Grønnegaard Milbrat plays Vilads very well and naturally but the use of the boy in the story is queasy in more ways than one. I guess we’re meant to think that asking teenage girls and young women if they want to have sex with him comes naturally to a kid raised in a free-love-oriented environment (though there’s no actual suggestion that his parents are anything but monogamous) – yet his doing so is based in a gratingly trite cuteness – the things kids come out with! Vilads’ illness is also central to the most obviously melodramatic incidents: he nearly dies as the commune is celebrating Christmas; his heart eventually gives out when Freja introduces Peter to the household. The relationship between those two is lifeless: I wasn’t sure if the lack of comment on fourteen-year-old Freja’s love life reflected the commune members’ sexually liberated views or her parents’ self-absorption or simply negligence on the part of the scriptwriters. Freja is watchful but she keeps very quiet until a big scene near the end when she tearfully advises Anna to leave the commune. (It should be noted that this is one of those movies that looks set to end about eight times before it eventually does.) It’s meant to be a dramatic irony, in view of their respective positions at the start of the film, that Anna does indeed depart the scene while Erik remains in the commune. The ironic effect is weak, however. Anna’s exit is the result of her husband’s adultery rather than the consequences of communal living. Erik, having traded his wife for a younger model, still doesn’t look very happy with his radical way of domestic life.
24 July 2016
