Monday, August 01, 2016

the commune

Moira and I went along to the Watershed this afternoon - together with Gareth, Alan, Eilidh and Ed - to see Thomas Vinterberg’s film “The Commune”.
Set in mid-1970s Copenhagen, a professional couple with a teenage daughter, inherit a large house. The husband, Erik (played by Ulrich Thomsen) wants to sell it and enjoy the money, while the wife, Anna (excellently played by Trine Dyrholm) thinks that it would be great fun to share the house with friends (and friends of friends). As the film title suggests, they decide to follow the commune option!
The commune’s members of idealists and dreamers duly begin to negotiate their new joint life, but (as the Watershed’s programme blurb makes it abundantly clear - *spoiler alert*) their lives are devastated by an “earth-shattering love affair”… but I won’t spoil things by outlining any further details!
Strangely, and somewhat eerily, Erik played an architectural university lecturer and looked remarkably like one of my own architectural lecturers (for whom I later worked in 1976-78), whose character traits might even have had some similarities with those of Erik!
An interesting, but somewhat predictable, film about mid-life crisis (but which revealed virtually nothing of the lives of the most of the commune’s members).
Unremarkable and disappointing, I’m afraid.

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