Back to the 70s in Thomas Vinterberg's surprising period piece, THE COMMUNE

If you are expecting here -- because Thomas Vinterberg's new film, THE COMMUNE, takes place in and around one of those experiments in communal living that were popular in Scandinavia back in the 1970s -- something akin to another internationally popular Scandinavian movie about "community," Lucas Moodysson's Together,  better reset your sites. That earlier (2001) and quite funny/charming film was much more a rom-com-dramedy that this new effort. Oh, there are some laughs, all right, and romance (of sorts), too. But this is altogether a darker, deeper and more unsettling -- as we've come to expect from Mr. Vinterberg, who earlier gave us The Hunt and The Celebration -- look at the, ummm, "joys" of communal life.

The filmmaker, pictured at left, who co-wrote (with Tobias Lindholm) and directed the movie, wants to explore, as he always does, things like motive, need, and in this case especially, marriage and the male prerogative as middle age occurs.

While The Commune is indeed an ensemble film, that ensemble is clearly led by the couple -- played very well indeed by two fine Danish actors, Trine Dyrholm (shown below) and Ulrich Thomsen (two photos down). In fact, the movie mostly belongs to Ms Dyrholm's wife, Anna, who initially pushes her husband, Erik, into this new communal living and then lives to regret it.

As a dissection of marriage of a couple entering middle age -- exploring everything from their respective careers to their lovemaking and the psychology of their various behaviors -- the movie is first-rate, pulling no punches nor sugar-coating a thing.

Set in the 70s, when both feminism and greater sexual freedom for all were coming into vogue, the movie still makes quite clear the ways in which men act and women adapt. The new commune is born mostly because Erik feels that he, Anna and their teenage daughter, Freja (a terrific performance from newcomer, Martha Sofie Wallstrøm Hansen, below, who, if she wants to continue this career should probably shorten that name a tad) cannot afford to live in the large "family" house he has just inherited.

As the commune grows, we get a nice mixture of characters and types, the arrival of whom provides the movie with much of its humor, and then some surprise and unexpected drama. Leading the little group is an actor of whom TrustMovies grows increasingly fond: Fares Fares (at left, below), who did such a fine job playing second fiddle in the recent Department Q trilogy and made worthwhile appearances in two of the Easy Money movies.

Other members include the initial couple's best friend, along with a sweet, trouble pair and their little son, who turns out to not be quite as healthy as we earlier imagined, and finally a newcomer (Helene Reingaard Neumann, below, right) who can perhaps be called a "marriage destroyer." Or maybe not.

Because of Vinterberg's astute handling of everything from psychology and sexual roles to guilt and responsibility, this marriage, as we discover, has most likely long been in trouble. As with so many of our lives, it simply takes some shaking up to bring out the truth of things.

From Magnolia Pictures, running 111 minutes, and in Danish with English subtitles, The Commune opens this coming Friday, May 19, in Los Angeles area (at Laemmle's Royal, Noho 7 and Playhouse 7) and New York City (at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and Landmark's Sunshine) and will spread out to another dozen cities in the weeks to come. Click here to see all currently scheduled playdates.

Our Sunday Corner with Lee Liberman -- Thomas Hardy: Far From the Madding Crowd, streaming on HBO

According to novelist Thomas Hardy, there were always badly matched marriage partners, thwarted happiness, and suffering in lovely rural Wessex, (a fictional county in South West England) because Victorian society was that stifling. Hardy (1840-1928) used his rural tales to show the tragic effects that social constraints had on individuals especially regarding marriage and social mobility.

The dictionary defines "madding" as 'frenzied' or 'maddening'. Thus the title infers a rural setting layered with generations who have worked the land (sowing, harvesting, lambing, bee-hiving, etc.) may seem immune from the impurities of city life; but no, making the opposite point to Tolstoy's in Anna Karenina, life in the sticks was as perverse and misery-making as life in the city. The novel of Bathsheba Everdene and her 3 suitors was disconcerting in the day (1874) -- saturated as it was with modern erotic overtones and misery, leading to Hardy's ironic title. However, this tale, unlike Hardy novels to follow, does offer up a conventional happy ending. If this is your one shot at Hardy, enjoy, but for comparison, see the film of Hardy's Woodlanders (1997) with Rufus Sewell streaming on Netflix.

Thomas Vinterberg (above) emerged as a Danish film director: a handsome "precocious, brilliant brat," wrote Guardian reviewer, Andrew Pulver. His bad boy period followed years of youth spent in a middle-class commune, including several films more preoccupied with form than content -- they flopped. Says Vinterberg, "I found I am not an anarchistic form creator; I'm intuitive and I'm trying to figure out a way to explore human frailty." Subsequently his film The Hunt (2012) with Mads Mikkelsen was Academy-Awards nominated Best Foreign Language Film. Now comes "Madding"(2015), a workmanlike production that checks the director box for 'historical fiction', if a somewhat thin effort regarding Hardy's message. The film ploughs and slices through the novel's plot points without lingering on frailty of character, despite Vinterberg having staked out this territory in his own words and it's being material to the novel. But once you see the film, you will know backwards and forwards "what happens" in Hardy's famous work; have savored its sumptuous landscape; and found the piece enjoyable, whatever the critics say.

Vinterberg follows others, notably John Schlesinger, who directed a 3-hour version of the novel in 1967. Critics faulted Schlesinger for not conveying the paralyzing social constraints of the Victorians and for Julie Christie's Bathsheba played as an ethereal feminine archetype which Hardy's Bathsheba certainly was not; but otherwise Schlesinger is said to have better delivered on the psychological overtones than Vinterberg. Carey Mulligan's Bathsheba (above and below), however, is just right -- a sturdy young modern driven by her own will and sense (often naive) of being able to shape her own destiny -- decisively her own mistress and manager of her employees. She masters the business of her estate, impulsively marries the wrong guy, and then gets a do-over. Not bad, except for the tragedy left in her wake. Mulligan glows; she is very much up to the task of Bathsheba Everdene.

The plot in brief: A poor, if well-educated Miss Everdene inherits her uncle's estate and is determined to run it herself, including joining in farm labor. She juggles three earnest suitors -- the reticent if solid farmer Gabriel Oak played by the broad-shouldered Belgian, Matthias Schoenaerts (Rust and Bone, The Danish Girl, currently on screen in sizzler A Bigger Splash); wealthy neighbor Mr Boldwood played with painful self-abnegation by Michael Sheen, a stage and film actor of ingenious and resourceful talent (Masters of Sex), and Frank Troy, the narcissist, played by Tom Sturridge (On the Road, Effie Gray) as a brash, nasty piece of work for whom you squeeze out half an ounce of sympathy anyway. He has impregnated farm girl, Fanny, (Juno Temple), whose life is ruined, her tragedy threading sorrow through the story.

Hardy used some names intentionally. His Gabriel (not only having the surname 'Oak') means 'God's able bodied man'. Bathsheba, like Bathsheba of the Bible, is an object of desire who unwittingly causes death or disaster. A 'dene' is a deeply wooded gorge; thus 'Bathsheba Everdene' represents sex and destructive power set lushly in nature. And she surely played Helen to Sturridge's Troy.

Bathsheba herself hasn't a mean bone in her body; it's just that her strong sense of self stirs up and muddles the conventional expectations around her. Mr. Boldwood (below) says "Miss Everdene, I want very much, more than ANYTHING, to have you as my wife", but Bathsheba will be had by no one (until Troy seduces her, above). Vinterberg does not let us in on Mr. Boldwood's growing lapse into fantasy, pretending she will be his wife. We get a glimpse of his accumulated 'Bathsheba Boldwood' collection of jewels and clothing but nothing of his obsessive behavior. Michael Sheen makes brilliant use of bits of script to convey Boldwood's misery, he breaks your heart in just a few passages, but there is simply not enough story line there to help us imagine his progression from bereaved to demented.

Many a woman will recognize the art of the con in Francis Troy's first invasive stare at Bathsheba. (Hardy tells us Troy 'lied like a cretin' to women.) Just stare and tell a woman she is the most beautiful creature ever seen -- it works. Bathsheba melts into mush. From what we see of her responses to Oak and Boldwood's advances, Bathsheba's rapid seduction by the sociopathic Troy takes her (and us) off guard. She abandons her autonomy and 'what is right' in a mere moment. This shirker doesn't deserve a minute more time in our face, but it would have helped to linger a bit on Bathsheba's bedazzlement (a lesson to all women).

Matthias Schoenaerts' reliable sheep farmer gives nothing away. Whatever pain and disappointment he endures at Bathsheba's rejection, he gets the force of her independence but neither love nor pain ever shows in his eyes. Schoenaerts could have leaked something through those windows, though Gabriel Oak is otherwise endearing and his sensible counsel and actions form the backbone of the story. (Below he teaches her how to sharpen tools.)

Oak warns her about Troy, otherwise staying aloof and stoic while his rivals play out their hands, but supports her through crisis and chaos. At last, having been burned by love, Bathsheba finally knows his value to her, providing the slightly upbeat ending for a Hardy novel (though not upbeat for the several characters whose ending was quite terrible).

I have implicitly faulted Vinterberg for not letting us in quite enough on the harshness of the emotional lives of Hardy's characters; most of the information is there but the chop chop of events needs to slow so the heady emotion in the story can breathe enough for us to absorb it. Nonetheless, this is a lovely work that offers its pleasures, and Vinterberg has checked off 'period film' on his CV with enough dignity to move on -- or perhaps absorb a backward move. His next film The Commune, is based on his own childhood experience.

The above post was written by 

our monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman

THE HUNT: Thomas Vinterberg's -- and one of the year's -- best & most unsettling films

Pedophilia is such a hot-button topic that few narrative films tend to go there. Documentaries do, particularly when the abuser is connected with The Catholic Church, an organization more than worthy of ridicule and disdain. The subject is most often used as the cheap hook for sex-and-violence television and/or cable fare. This is one reason, of many, that the new Danish film THE HUNT (Jagten) is so worthy of your time and attention.

In it, a little girl (an exactly-right performance from Annika Wedderkopp, above, right)-- exposed to a provocative sexual visual by one of her older brother's adolescent friends around the same time as she experiences a rebuff from a much-beloved teacher and friend -- puts two and two together and gets 22. She doesn't lie, exactly, but she deliberately connects things that were heretofore unconnected, and when all hell breaks loose from her original comment, she is practically forced by almost all the adults around her to stick by her "story" and in fact elaborate on it.

How this plays out in The Hunt may bring to the minds of many of us Americans the infamous McMartin case from the 1980s -- a near model of what not to do in investigating supposed sexual abuse -- not to mention the more recent documentary Capturing the Friedmans that investigates similar territory. The former case was shown to be concocted out of the loony-tune minds of sex-hysterics; the latter unfortunately, despite strong evidence of poorly-handled investigation by the prosecution, continues to mine its injustices.

The film begins with what looks like the Danish version of a Polar Bear Club late-fall swim (two photos above), and then we hop from the water to home, school and all around town, noting the charm and easy camaraderie of this seemingly tight little community -- which proves just as tight in its hatred for and closing out of the would-be pedophile, once the rumor begins to spread. Nothing in this story is particularly new, I grant you, but its telling could hardly be better in terms of pulling us into the fast-crumbling life of its protagonist, played by the brilliantly empathic and versatile actor Mads Mikkelsen (above).

We see example after example of former friends and associates turn away from this innocent man, and as awful as this is to witness, it is also quite believable, for as one of the accusers states, "Children don't lie." Of course they do, but this is another of mankind's fondest hypocrisies, and it's one that is especially difficult to sink. I am trying to think of another film that places us this thoroughly under the skin of an accused innocent, but nothing comes to mind.

You will hate the rotten townspeople on view, even as you cannot help but wonder if you would be doing the same thing under similar circumstances. You'll feel disgust at the way all this is handled -- by the school, the authorities, the parents. And yet how often, you'll wonder, does something very nearly the same happen?

As directed and co-written (with Tobias Lindholm) by Thomas Vinterberg (shown at left, of Submarino and The Celebration), the movie looks smashing, as well. The photography (by Charlotte Bruus Christensen) is alternately gorgeous and colorful, dark and drained, and the writing is so very much better than that of A Hijacking (another recent Lindholm film). Directorially, the movie is the most polished of Vinterberg's career.

The ability to make viewers' blood boil -- and yet allow them to understand precisely how and why this must occur -- is no simple task, and Vinterberg deserves high praise for achieving this so well. He's clearly on the side of our hero but he also understands the townspeople's fear and anger, and even better, he lets us into the mind and feelings of the young girl in question.

Part thriller, part character study, part moral-quandary movie, The Hunt works on every level. And its unsettling ending seems to me just right in a number of ways. Off-balance is how we live now.

The movie, from Magnolia Pictures and running a fast-paced 111 minutes, opens today, Friday, July 12, in New York (at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and the Angelika Film Center) and in Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Royal and Playhouse 7). In the weeks (and months) to come, the film will open all around the country. To see all currently scheduled playdates, click here.