Together puts a sweeter, Swedish, socialist spin on the emerging genre of ensemble-cast 1970's period pieces. Like the porn crew in Boogie Nights or the suburban swingers in The Ice Storm, Together's 1975 Stockholm commune residents struggle with the petty jealousies and tensions and psychic damage attending their participation in a group effort at "free love." But director Moodysson is here less interested than his predecessors in the attendant dramatic extremes of titillation and degradation and more focused on his characters' underlying yearnings for companionship--and their fragile efforts to make a communal family work.
The film's goofy, shaggy good intentions are embodied by Goran (played well by Gustaf Hammarsten) the gentle, feckless soul who tries to hold together the commune's ragtag mix of political ideologues, sexual adventurers, and assorted castoffs. When his sister leaves her abusive husband and moves into the commune with her two children, Goran finds himself torn between maintaining the abstract "commitments" of the group--such as sexual openeness, vegetarianism, or the avoidance of media culture--and doing what feels right, like monogamy and giving the kids what they want, meat and TV. Ultimately the "extremist" characters, whether the extremism is political (Maoism) or sexual (nymphomania) either reject or are rejected by the commune's mainstream, and the remaining residents muster some moving, if fleeting, togetherness.