The Commune (Kollektivet)
Director: Thomas Vinterberg
Talent: Ulrich Thomsen, Fares Fares, Trine Dyrholm, Julie Agnete Vang, Lars Ranthe
Released: 29th July
Almost 20 years after playing the troubled lead of Thomas Vinterberg’s influential Dogme 95 picture Festen, Kollektivet sees Ulrich Thomsen back in action as a reserved but ill-tempered architecture professor Erik, who presumably by accident rather than design looks exactly like Ken Barlow. The film begins as he and his newsreader wife Anna (Dyrholm) have, in the countercultural spirit of the early ’70s, decided to turn his recently inherited childhood home into a communal living space with a motley crew of friends and acquaintances.
While Dyrholm played the waitress to whom Thomsen’s Christian eventually proposes at the end of Festen, and now Kollektivet sees the two play out in middle-age a somewhat fragile and put upon marriage in ’70s Copenhagen, the comparisons between the two films are more than just superficial. Vinterberg’s 1998 work was a searing yet formally austere drama that found the deepest of brutality lurking under the surface of the nuclear and, incidentally, aristocratic family unit; Kollektivet on the other hand is a glossier, melodramatic piece that explores a rather more banal emotional pain in the context of a deeply unconventional domestic setting. Indeed, the comparisons between Thomsen’s Erik and the great Ken Barlow too run deeper than appearances, as it is his infidelity that sets in motion the real drama of the film. Indeed the commune acts both to catalyse and enable Erik’s decision to sleep with an impressionable student of his, eventually pushing towards a situation in which she, Erik and the spurned Anna might live together under the same roof, constantly surrounded by their housemates.
It is both to the film’s credit and discredit that said housemates serve as a decidedly two-dimensional backdrop to the central story of infidelity. In this way Vinterberg delivers an extremely affecting and somewhat unique emotional narrative, but in doing so sacrifices a great deal of depth to the sort of caricature — of, for want of a better term, bourgeois leftism — that plays so well to the cultural middlebrow, as fellow Scandinavian auteur Karl Ove Knausgård, for example, can no doubt attest to.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
