30/10/2023 - Lukas Moodysson’s sequel to his 2000 hit is little more than a nostalgic, somewhat reactionary update on protagonists whom viewers are expected to remember perfectly

Centred on a Swedish commune in 1975, Lukas Moodysson’s 2000 hit Together featured a colourful array of characters and much of the film’s pleasure laid in watching completely unselfconscious people act out dynamics they were oblivious to, with good and bad consequences. Unaware of the reasons for their hang ups, they could sometimes act out of character and change for the better, but this lack of awareness also meant that they could hurt others without realising. It was a resolutely un-psychological portrait of a generation that was propelled beyond their unaddressed issues by vitality, enthusiasm, and the simple joy of being, indeed, together. 

It would be unwise to expect the same from the sequel Together 99 [+see also:
trailer
film profile], set 24 years later. But it seems fair to hope for a similarly cohesive look at a group of people behaving in ways suited to their time. In this new film, world-premiered in Toronto's Special Presentations strand, and now released in Sweden, Finland and Norway through SF Studios, however, each man is an island.

Part of the reason why is that the commune has essentially disbanded in the years since. Of the half dozen people that initially constituted it, only Göran (Gustaf Hammarsten) and Klasse (Shanti Roney) remain, living together in a big house in the countryside. But this only partly explains the film’s inability to recover the sense of togetherness of its title. Strong personalities clashed constantly in the original film, as they do in Together 99 when Klasse organises a surprise reunion with the surviving members. But in the first film, Moodysson’s dynamic camera, the manual zooms on characters and the swift editing from one domestic scene to another, meant that we were always aware of the entire microcosm of the house. The much more sedate style of the new film may echo the characters’ more depressed temperaments and the slower rhythm of their lives, but it also ruins the impression of the house as a group at all. 

Something else that helped give that impression in the first film was the throughline of Elisabeth (Lisa Lindgren), Göran’s sister, coming to stay at her brother’s commune with her two children after leaving her violent husband Rolf (the regretted Michael Nyqvist). While Elisabeth and the kids embraced the less restrictive and more supportive ways of life in the commune, Rolf realised the pain of being alone; by the end of the film, communal living emerged as a much better model than the traditional family unit. 

There is no such throughline in Together 99, and no true reflection on what living together might actually mean. The title is no doubt ironic, and it is indeed hard to imagine people in their 50s continuing to live this way. But Moodysson seems to have no interest in truly showing us why they left the commune in the first place or why they couldn’t return now — and what the late 1990s might have to do with all this — beyond the disappointingly banal observation that all now have their own, very conventional lives. Even more reactionary are certain character developments that feel like betrayals of the original film’s radical spirit: resident feminist Anna (Jessica Liedberg), who appeared happy simply drinking wine and exploring her sexuality in the commune, is revealed to have been writing all along and is now a successful novelist, while Göran’s ex-girlfriend Lena (Anja Lundqvist), a narcissist unceremoniously thrown out of the house in one of the best scenes from the first film, has developed a mental illness as a result. So many decisions that speak more of an apparent fear of offence and a terribly cliched vision of life in middle age, than of the hope and affection we could expect from the director of the magical original film. 

Together 99 was produced by Sweden’s Memfis Film & TV in co-production with Film i Väst, SF Studios Production AB, and Denmark’s Zentropa Entertainments. International sales are handled by REinvent Studios.