★★★★☆
In The Commune, a swinging Copenhagen hippy community in the early Seventies comes under the moral microscope of Thomas Vinterberg. The Danish director´s previous films include the disturbing family reunion Festen, and The Hunt, about a village´s response to a man wrongly accused of child molestation. There is nothing he likes better than creating his own Big Brother house, trapping his protagonists and teasing out their weaknesses, falsehoods and quiet heroism.
The star of Vinterberg´s latest is the wonderful actress Trine Dyrholm (Love is All You Need). She plays Anna, whose husband Erik (Ulrich Thomsen) inherits a large, rackety mansion. Realising that the upkeep is too much, the couple - along with their 14-year-old daughter Freja - decide to invite old friends to be part of an experiment in communal living - and heavy drinking, as it turns out. The fellow travellers include a couple, Steffen and Ditte, whose seven-year-old son has a palpitating heart; Allon, a taciturn and tearful bearded foreigner; Ole, the chain-smoking leader; and Mona, who rarely says no to a man and wears a terrific Afghan coat.
“I´m bored, Erik. I need a change. I´ve heard it all before,” Anna tells her husband as they plan the commune, but her words - naturally - have a hollow ring by the end of the film. The group gel splendidly together and the two only children happily find themselves brother and sister, looking on at the fun political debate and the growing domestic chaos, which calls for a dishwasher. The initial scenes are rather comic, as Ole occasionally burns other people´s possessions for the crime of being capitalist clutter.
The film is steeped in muted Seventies colours, cars and fashion: beige and brown striped jumpers and fawn suede and corduroy coats, a dull background to the sharp pains that emerge as the commune takes its inevitable course. Of course, being sensible Danish hippies, the communards mostly have proper jobs: Anna presents the evening news on television and Erik teaches architecture at the university. It is not long, however, before the newly liberated Erik falls for a 24-year-old student, Emma (Helene Reingaard Neumann), and is caught in flagrante by his daughter.
Anna realises that she has made her (now single) bed and must lie in it until the affair blows over, but principles are one thing and practice is a different agony. Downstairs there is the sound of a distant orgasm. Awkward. In one brilliant scene, the blonde lover and wife sit on a bench together and Emma looks like the younger version of Anna. “You´ve got brown eyes . . . ” says Anna dryly, pointing out the one tiny difference.
Meanwhile Erik is enjoying his role as pack leader. “I can´t imagine life without the two of you,” he says to his women, and in this case the freedom in the new utopia seems to belong mostly to the men. However, the daughter Freja is inspired to excesses of her own.
The film focuses a little too much on Erik and Anna, without giving the other housemates much of a place in the story - other than in the battles over the joint beer bill - but this perhaps reflects the preoccupations of Vinterberg´s own childhood: he grew up from the age of seven in a commune of urban professionals.
Dyrholm gives an extraordinary performance on her road from freedom to loss and back again, suffering from ageism both in her marriage and at work - the older female presenter has a sell-by date. It´s a role she tackles with bravery, puffy-eyed in desperate alcoholism and also utterly empathetic.