Is a commune still a commune if it only has two ? A quarter-century after we last met Lukas Moodysson’s Together family in his 2000 film about a group of pants-optional Swedish hippies striving to create a domestic utopia in 1975, only Göran and Klas remain in their dusty Stockholm house. Together 99 (Tillsammans 99) reunites the original friends at a late-nineties birthday party to see how the political and personal vagaries of the intervening years have affected Signe, Elisabeth, Klasse, Erik and friends.

The first film opens with a house heaving at the edges, but by millennium’s-end the collective dream has been reduced to the world’s smallest commune, in which two lonely men bicker and fuss over the correct way to do the dishes. It’s a far cry from the futuristic, horny, body-positive energy of the original, which, in the words of Letterboxd member Jack, is “a brilliant, freewheeling piece on family, time and identity.” “Together is always toeing the line between comedy and drama,” Christof agrees, “with the dominant mood being one of light-heartedness, despite also tackling hard subjects [such] as domestic violence in a sincere way.”

Together (apparently a favorite of Bob Odenkirk’s, and a fixture on Andre de Nervaux’s Letterboxd list of “films so lovely they act as a blanket on a cold winter night”) got a new lease on life this year in Arrow Video’s January release of The Lukas Moodysson Collection. The box-set features the wonderful Michael Nyqvist, who died in 2017, screaming his lungs out on the cover. Nyqvist’s character, Rolf, is missing in Together 99, but the rest of the sequel’s now-middle-aged characters have been warmly welcomed back by Toronto International Film Festival audiences.

As has Moodysson himself, with his first feature in a decade after the beloved tween-punk brilliance of 2013’s We Are the Best! (which was adapted from his wife Coco Moodysson’s autobiographical graphic novel, Never Goodnight). “It had even more to say about the human need for connection,” writes SaxyWalrusMan of Together 99’s bittersweet energy. “You never know if a scene is going to end up being tragic, emotionally devastating or farcical. Danger and anarchy constantly hovering,” Scott Kelly notes. 

When we meet in Toronto, in the midst of a strange, strike-afflicted TIFF, the director is a bit bemused to be out on the promotional trail again. It’s not a favorite activity, he its. He’d prefer to be home doing what he’s been doing for the past ten years: writing, listening to music, reading books, watching “a lot of reality TV” and hanging out with his three kids.

Nevertheless, Moodysson, whose films also include Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål) and Lilya 4-ever, is happy to be at TIFF to speak to the rewards of keeping loose on set, the possibility of redemption, and his personal prowess in the dishes department.

Lukas, I can’t express what a pleasure it was to see Lisa Lindgren and Henrik Lundström and the rest of the cast again. Why did you want to bring them back together?
Lukas Moodysson: Well, it took a long time for me to want that, because I felt like I wasn’t really interested in what was happening to them after a year or two, or even ten or so. I just felt like, ‘No, I should leave them alone.’ But then, when you get older, there are some things that you feel like happened quite recently, and you think about it and you realize it was actually twenty or 30 years ago… I think I needed that kind of perspective, the craziness of feeling that something is sort of close but also very, very far away. So then I started just fantasizing a little bit about what happened to the commune.

My first instinct was of course that the commune disintegrated completely, and then I felt like, ‘Oh, then I have to make a film about all these fragmented lives, and that doesn’t really sound like fun.’ But then I felt like there could be two people still there, and it could be Göran and Klas, and that would be so cute. And the next thing that came was also Erik. He was so extremely political, even communist—not only socialist, but communist in 1975—and he had to have had to make that turn in some way. So those were the starting points.

I was reading Letterboxd reviews this morning of the first film, just to get a refreshed sense of what it was we loved about Together the first time round. I mean, apart from this one review by Lea, who writes that Göran is the number one girl boss in the world. Would you like to respond to that?
No, I think that stands for itself.

Both films feature arguments about the dishes in the opening scenes. Talk to me about the microaggressions involved in dirty dishes in a household, and how we as a community can solve that problem.
I’ve become really good at doing the dishes, so it’s not a problem for me really these days. I’m not perfect, but I think I’m quite good at doing dishes. We’ve been married for almost 30 years, and after a while, you... It doesn’t have to be sharing. Some people can be better at some things and in some places. So, for example, we have a van, a camper van, and in that, my wife cooks all the food because I can’t. But at home, I cook all the food because she can’t. You have to sort of portion out what people are good at.

Yeah, but there’s something very specific about how fucked-up dishes make people.
For me, doing laundry is worse. That’s more of a conflict area. I don’t really feel like I’m very good at doing the laundry. I’m better at doing the dishes, I think.

And sorry I keep banging on about the dishes, but watching Together and then Together 99, and the fact that it’s a thing in both, had me feeling like, ‘If we can solve this issue, we can solve humanity’s problems.’ One of the things, right, is that someone could be doing the dishes and the person who’s not doing them will stand right there going, ‘You’re doing it wrong’.
Yeah.

But at least that person’s doing the dishes. This person’s just criticizing.
But it’s also really disgusting when Göran, in the beginning, when it’s, I believe Klas, when he says that, “It’s not really clean because you’re using cold water. You can’t do the dishes in cold water.” I actually agree there with Klas. I think you should do the dishes all right, really. Sloppy dishes, no.

You did something really interesting with music this time: there’s very little of it, and it’s either much older or very contemporary to 1999. Swedish superstars ABBA were such a major soundtrack feature of Together, and then you come to ’99 and we’re a long way from the seventies—it’s all about the rave scene.
Well, it’s also a reaction for me personally against what I feel: that [in] so many films and even more TV series, it’s overloaded by music. I just don’t want to push people in telling them how to feel here and add sad music or energetic music. I just want people to sort of see the film in itself.

Normally in a party like that, because it’s a dinner and a party, they should listen to music, and I really didn’t want them to so I had to invent the idea that the amplifier was broken so they couldn’t listen to any music. They could only listen on this old thing that I don’t know the word for in English [gramophone], which meant that they had to listen to music actually from their parents’ generation, which makes it sort of nostalgic for them. Which also, for me, adds a kind of weird atmosphere to the whole thing, because that music is also from the Second World War, so it doesn’t really add up, which makes it sort of strange in a way.

And then, with this film, I think a lot of time I just wanted to just push them into as much chaos as possible as a director, and just take as many chances as possible, because I never really read the script. I feel like there are two persons in me: there’s one who writes the script and then there is the director who doesn’t really care about the script. Occasionally I have to go back to the script because I think ‘maybe all that dialogue that I wrote that was actually good, so let’s stick to that dialogue’, but a lot of the times they just improvise quite a lot, actually.

Also I have a cinematographer [Ellinor Hallin] who’s great at just letting go and just seeing what happens, so we never really plan anything except when it’s sort of technically difficult. Like, if it takes place outside, in darkness, then we unfortunately had to put up a lamp or something like that, but otherwise everything is made in natural light and so on. So we just played around.

Even though [the cast] were in the first film, I think they were a bit surprised in the beginning that everything was so loose the whole time. I was always running around and didn’t know where my shoes were, and just lost everything and just had people to help me find my script, and I don’t know. I need a lot of help when I’m directing because I never really know what to do after lunch and so on. The only thing I want to do when I’m directing is sort of be in the present and try to make some kind of life there. And then it was just fun to watch them, because they’re really good.