Not quite one big happy family
The Commune 15 Cert, 112min
Dir Thomas Vinterberg Starring Trine Dyrholm, Ulrich Thomsen, Fares Fares, Julie Agnete Vang, Lars Ranthe, Helene Reingaard Neumann, Mads Reuther, Martha Sofie Wallstrøm Hansen, Magnus Millang, Anne Gry Henningsen
The last time Danish director Thomas Vinterberg stuck a bunch of people under one roof in party spirits, and watched the situation implode, was for 1998’s Festen, a drama with an incest bombshell waiting to go off. In The Commune, reuniting two of that film’s lead actors, he loosely recalls an episode from his own childhood, as a virtual hostage being brought up in a Copenhagen living experiment.
Set in the Seventies and with all the baggy knitwear to prove it, the film begins with famous newsreader Anna (Trine Dyrholm) and her husband Erik (Ulrich Thomsen), a professor of architecture, wondering what to do with the family manse he’s just inherited from his father. They have a daughter, played persuasively by Martha Sofie Wallstrøm Hansen, and their sex life seems fine, at least to him.
It’s Anna’s idea to spice things up, theoretically in a Platonic way, by inviting in other people, starting with her old friend Ole (the amusingly louche Lars Ranthe), to shack up in their overlarge, echoey home.
The rules are clear: it’s a liberal democracy, in which everyone does their bit, and gets to vote on whether new invitees should stay. A younger couple, their son, and some other single adults join the throng, all chipping in for rent – or all except lone non-white housemate Allon (Fares Fares), whose interrogation by Erik gets so testy that he bursts into tears, winning a kind of gratis sympathy vote unanimously.
Where Vinterberg is heading with all this is fairly obvious. When the inevitable unhappiness rears its head, it concentrates itself semi-exclusively on Dyrholm’s Anna, starting when Erik confesses that he’s been having an affair with a student called Emma.
Dyrholm won Best Actress in Berlin for her performance, and it’s certainly The Commune’s ace in the hole. She attracts so much focus, so well, that the film blurs in almost every other respect – the rest of the ensemble can only sit and gawp, offer banalities, or do their best to avoid her gaze.
The Commune doesn’t openly stumble so much as constrict itself awkwardly inside its main love triangle, short-changing the terrific supporting cast, and nearly forgetting what we thought it was all about.