The Commune

The film is set in 1970s Denmark, when idealists launched communes as a love-loving, open counterweight to the conflicts of and over the Vietnam war. 

Today the film reflects upon the challenge that human emotions and relationships bring to any theory of social planning. Though set in the 70s it’s clearly about the post-commune age of today as well. However strong the spirit or idea, the flesh, the human reality, may well prove too weak to sustain it. Write in your own contemporary context. 

The commune spirit is personified by Anna. She has the idea of turning her husband Erik’s inherited family estate into a commune so they and their teenage daughter Freja can afford to live there. 

Erik is an architect, a builder, though his professional career still requires him to teach. Anna is a well-known TV news presenter, an observer not a maker of news or structures. In inviting family friend Ole to join she launches the commune over her husband’s concerns. Anna most visibly enjoys the spirited life in the commune. The observer’s venture into building seems at first to work. 

But despite all that new idealism, the old male privilege persists. Erik may extravagantly deny being any “boss” and he signs over his ownership of the estate to the commune. But in the crunch he asserts his authority to admit his new mistress to the commune, at whatever pain to Anna. In her idealism Anna suggested his Emma move in, but her emotion at her loss of Erik and her sense of her own fading beside her young successor defeat her resolve. The modern sophisticated commune proves essentially tribal when its founder Anna has to move out to allow Erik’s peaceful life with Emma. 

The male is so privileged that even the little boy with the heart condition uses his weakness (“I’m going to die before I’m nine”) to hustle women. Including Emma, at first sight: “You want to shag?” His heart finally gives out when his more practical romantic chance, Freja, brings her boyfriend to dinner.  

In her New Age womanhood Anna tries to accept her husband’s affair with the pretty third-year (i.e., really young) student. She even treats her rival warmly. But her valiant effort can’t stand up to her emotional needs. She crumbles on air, then shatters the dinner table peace when she declares her own emotional needs. Erik’s more violent emotional eruptions are excused but not Anna’s. The temperamental male here even gets to faint! Anna is fired for her first freeze. 

Fired, humiliated, shattered, she luckily has her daughter’s trust and confidence — which empowers her to move out of her idealized construction and take on the real world on her own. How she will fare we don’t know, because the film opts for the happy ending of the commune, carrying on without her. 

But there’s still another scene. Daughter Freja leaves the family to go to her boyfriend. He’s older but rather vacuous in looks, character, wit, manner. But he accepted her sexual initiative. In the last scene she finds him lying stoned at a party so she snuggles up. He offers her headphones to join his isolated experience and doesn’t hear her “I love you.” Like her mother, Freja constructs an idealized, romanticized connection and invests herself in it, to her own peril and eventual cost. 

Like Freja later, Emma took the sexual initiative with her professor with the delusion she’s empowered by submitting to the supposedly superior male. She comes to his office disturbed at his humiliation of her male student friend. She even puts up with the prof’s arrogant dismissal of her own project proposal. She needs to plumb her own emotional experience, the up-tight unproven architect insists. Claiming to detect a more sensitive inner guy, she invites his kiss. Mona's "generous with my body" confirms the theme of women pretending to freedom by submitting to male needs.
     The 1970s setting allows for another ironic presence: the swarthy Allon, a broke, jobless, helpless loner, whose testiness at the admission interview provokes Erik’s anger. By crying, Allon converts the commune’s rejection to admission, even though he can’t pay his share and seems incapable of making any significant contribution — until he magically produces the collective’s desired dishwasher! No contemporary representation of a European society could omit the refugee factor. Allon is a vulnerable outsider, anticipating the Muslim refugee issue we recognize today in fuller form.