Season 2002/3

Moulin Rouge

Christian, a young poet, leaves his respectable background behind when he moves to the bohemian underworld of Montmartre. Taken under the wing of the hedonistic artist Toulouse-Lautrec, he becomes a regular at the notorious nightclub, the Moulin Rouge, where he falls under the spell of Satine, the most beautiful courtesan in Paris, and the star of the show.

Paris is returning to our screens in a big way, and here we have the wildly over-the-top fantasy Paris of Baz Luhrmann's "musical", Moulin Rouge. It is a gorgeously, intricately conceived city, but stately and monolithic, like a chandelier or a gigantic and very expensive Fabergé egg. This is to be the setting for the story of Satine, played by the statuesque Nicole Kidman; she is a courtesan-cum-chanteuse at the Moulin Rouge, who falls in love with Christian, a penniless would-be writer played by Ewan McGregor. It is a computer generated-Paris which does not need to be taken seriously, Like everything else in this madly over- excitable film - like the design, the plot, the performances and especially the music - it is a great big joke, tipping us a cheeky wink.

From the first frame of this film, Moulin Rouge screams along at breakneck pace. With his cartoon gestures and his trademark crash zooms into people's faces, Luhrmann cannot - or will not - calm down. We are never allowed to draw breath.

There are loads of pastiche musical numbers, when the principals burst into anachronistic song: The Sound of Music, Diamond Dogs, Roxanne and Song For Guy. But in each and every case, Luhrmann seems to be inviting a little whoop of congratulatory applause simply to laud his sheer cleverness in having 19th-century Parisians sing 1970s pop songs.

Luhrmann is fortunate to have the excellent Jim Broadbent as Zidler, the puffy, paunchy impresario who bullies Satine into giving up her love for Christian so that she can sleep with the libidinous Duke of Worcester, who has promised to put money into the club.

Nicole Kidman herself cuts an intriguing and patrician figure, as tall and delicate as a baby giraffe. As for Ewan McGregor, he is the happiest he has been in a long time. His open, likeable face actually responds rather well to Luhrmann's hyperactive, beady-eyed direction, and this is an engaging and attractive performance.

The Royal Tenenbaums

The Tenenbaums are an eccentric New York family. Actually, they're extraordinary--all geniuses. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) is a successful litigator. His wife Etheline (Angelica Huston) is an ambitious archaeologist. His daughter Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a gifted playwright. His son Chas (Ben Stiller) is a masterful businessman with a taste for real estate. And his other son Richie (Brian Wilson) is a natural tennis champ. However, when Royal packed up his life and left his wife and his family in a cloud of betrayal, everything fell apart. Twenty years later, he feigns illness as an excuse to reunite with his estranged family.

From Wes Anderson, director of RUSHMORE, this film is full of true-to-life comic relief that will have audiences reeling.

Dinner Rush

The exciting, chaotic behind-the-scenes dramas of a TriBeCa Italian restaurant is lovingly brought to life in Dinner Rush. Director Bob Giraldi, a multi-award-winning director of music videos and commercials and an established New York restaurateur, assuredly creates a rapid-fire tale of gangsters, gourmet food, high-flying chefs, bookies and obnoxious patrons-made real with snappy dialogue and an experienced ensemble cast.

Danny Aiello is Louie Cropa, a longtime Italian restaurant owner who, grudgingly, has gone from dishing out pasta and gravy to plating up the latest trendy fare. His son (Edoardo Ballenni). the new celebrity chef, creates innovative dishes that the critics adore and fill the resaurant but its food Louie deems "not Italian".

Despite how it appears to his staff and the other diners, Louie insists that Duncan, the says chef, prepare his personal meals. Duncan is like a son to Louie, and it breaks Louie’s heart that the young man has developed a gambling problem. Upstairs, the restaurant is populated by a colourful cast of characters including a pretentious art dealer (Mark Margolis), a handsome man at the bar (John Corbett), a feared restaurant reviewer (Sandra Bernard). Louis’ faithful attorney, and a couple of uninvited thugs from Queens. Add to this one of the best-crafted surprise endings to come along in a long time and you have a recipe for one delicious night at the movies.

Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner

Evil in the form of an unknown shaman divides a small community of nomadic Inuit, upsetting its balance and spirit.

Twenty years pass. Two brothers emerge to challenge the evil order: Amaqjuaq, the Strong One, and Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner. Atanarjuat wins the hand of the lovely Atuat away from the boastful son of the camp leader, Oki, who vows to get even. Oki ambushes the brothers in their sleep, killing Amaqjuaq, as Atanarjuat miraculously escapes running naked over the spring sea ice.

Gosford Park

Robert Altman, one of America’s most distinctive filmmakers, journeys to England for the first time to create a unique film mosaic with an outstanding ensemble cast.

It is November, 1932. Gosford Park is the magnificent country estate to which Sir William McCordle and his wife, Lady Sylvia, gather relations and friends for a weekend shooting party. They have invited an eclectic group including a countess, a World War I hero, the British matinee idol Ivor Novello and an American film producer who makes Charlie Chan movies. As the guests assemble in the gilded drawing rooms above, their personal maids and valets swell the ranks of the house servants in the teeming kitchens and corridors below-stairs.

But all is not as it seems: neither amongst the bejewelled guests lunching and dining at their enormous leisure, nor in the attic bedrooms and stark work stations where the servants labour for the comfort of their employers. Part comedy of manners and part mystery, the film is finally a moving portrait of events that bridge generations, class, sex, tragic personal history – and culminate in a murder. (Or is it two murders…?)

Ultimately revealing the intricate relations of the above and below-stairs worlds with great clarity, Gosford Park illuminates a society and way of life quickly coming to an end.

Monsoon Wedding

An exuberant family drama set in Mira Nair's beloved Punjabi culture, where ancient tradition and dot com modernity combine in unique and perfect harmony.

As the romantic monsoon rains loom, the extended Verma family reunites from around the globe for a last minute arranged marriage in New Delhi. MONSOON WEDDING traces five intersecting stories, each navigating different aspects of love as they cross boundaries of class, continent and morality. The film celebrates a contemporary India never before seen on screen.

Mira Nair and the writer. Sabrina Dhawan, interweave the ancient and the modern, the old-fashioned and the irreverent, the innocent and the sexual in today's globalized Delhi. The intimate, handheld camera welcomes the viewer into the characters' lives and into Nair's own beloved Punjabi culture - robust, earthy and full of life. The audience is swept into the bacchanalian revelry of kebabs, whisky and Bollywood music that is a Punjabi wedding.

The family's hopes, anxieties and long-guarded secrets emerge amid frantic wedding preparations, and are juxtaposed with arresting montages of real life Delhi. The relentless summer heat mirrors the story's building intensity as the city anticipates the cooling torrent of the monsoons. And when the rain comes, the cathartic downpour brings romance, revelation and liberation.

The father of the bride, LALIT VERMA (50), and his wife PIMMI (45). have endured the ups and downs of a fairly traditional marriage for years. As their daughter prepares to marry and leave home, they reach out to each other once again, finding deep comfort in the history they have shared. The bride. ADITI (24), on the rebound from an aborted love affair with her former boss. VIKRAM (42), agrees to marry HEMANT (32), an engineer from Houston. Suddenly apprehensive about becoming a housewife in Texas. Aditi re-visits her lover the day before the wedding, throwing her future into turmoil.

P.K. DUBEY (25) is the upwardly mobile Tent and Catering contractor for the elaborate wedding celebrations. A cellphone wielding wheeler dealer, he is a member of. India's emerging urban middle class. Dubey's tough pragmatism is outdone by the innocence and virtue of the family's maid, ALICE (20). He accidentally spies on Alice as she secretly dresses in the ornaments of her mistress and finds himself falling hopelessly in love with her. Theirs is the only pure and completely unexpected love story in the film, echoed by their bizarre shared habit of eating the core of marigolds the Indian wedding flower.

RIA (28) is the unmarried writer cousin of the bride. As she watches Aditi plunge recklessly into marriage. Ria begins to assert herself to her family, defying convention and revealing a disturbing secret she has suppressed for years.

In a story of steamy unconsummated teenage lust. AYESHA (17), another cousin of the bride, is a sexy Delhi 'babe' who meets RAHUL (19), a sophomore at the University of Sydney returning to India after five years. Surprised by Ayesha's boldness. Rahul becomes infatuated with this brazen young Indian woman who challenges all his assumptions about contemporary Indian culture.

This film is a love song to the city of Delhi and a portrait of modern, cosmopolitan India. Two thirds of MONSOON WEDDING was shot in an affluent farm house on the city's outskirts, the rest in locations in both the old and new cities: the exteriors of old Mughal Delhi and the gaudy charm of the wedding sari shops of Karol Bagh juxtaposed with the chic ateliers of the city's established designer culture and its posh corporate world. The filmmakers use the mobility and economy of a hand held camera, capturing subtle, expressive performances from a huge ensemble cast.

The cast is made up of acclaimed Indian movie stars. highly trained theatre actors from The National School of Drama. and lesser known television actors and firsttimers. The principal cast includes Naseeruddin Shah, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz, Roshan Seth, Lillete Dubey, Vasundhara Das, Kulbhushan Kharbanda. Rajat Kapoor and Tilotama Shome.

The film is filled with music, including ghazals (traditional love songs). modern Indian pop, jazz and bhangra (Punjabi folk/pop) music. all of which help to capture the varied and joyful sounds of a Punjabi wedding. The music and dance of old and new style Bollywood is a constant presence in Indian life. MONSOON WEDDING echoes this Bollywood spirit with its vibrant score and with Ayesha's climactic dance number the night before the wedding.

MONSOON WEDDING is a celebration of the sensual pleasures of cinema, of love at any age anytime, and of the importance of family. It also pays affectionate tribute to a city where weighty tradition collides daily with global culture and the dot com age, yielding an unusual and melodious harmony.

Kandahar

Nafas is a young Afghan journalist who has taken refuge in Canada. She receives a desperate letter from her little sister, who has stayed behind in Afghanistan and has decided to end her life before the imminently approaching eclipse of the sun.

Nafas fled her country during the Taliban civil war. She decides to go and help her sister in Kandahar and attempts to cross the Iran – Afghanistan border …

Kandahar is based on the true story of an Afghan woman who had escaped the Taliban to become a journalist in Canada, and then attempted to return to save a despairing friend (her sister, for the movie) who had threatened suicide. That fact, along with the non-professional cast and stretches of halting English dialogue, gives the piece a semi-documentary feel: what in theatre terms might be called a rehearsed reading, were it not for the fact that much of the narrative was improvised while Makhmalbaf travelled with his crew around the Afghan border.

There are some stunning scenes: the mullah supervising the class of little boys learning the Koran, the Red Cross's surreal parachute drops of prosthetic legs for landmine victims, and the procession of women on their way to a wedding - all hidden under the burka , which so comprehensively denies women identity. As so often with Iranian cinema, there is a conscious refraining from affect: we know little or nothing about the heroine Nafas (Niloufar Pazira) or her sister, and the appalling details are vouchsafed laconically. But it only makes Nafas's risky return to the prison of a woman's existence under the Taliban even more disturbing. If the Northern Alliance stays in power, and if it has appreciably different ideas about women, Kandahar may turn out to be a historical document. Either way, it has haunting power.

The Heist

Joe Moore (Gene Hackman) has a beautiful young wife, money owed to him, and a job he loves. He’s a thief.

His job goes sour when he gets caught on security camera tape. His fence, Bergman (Danny DeVito) reneges on the money he’s owed, and his wife (Rebecca Pidgeon) may be betraying him with the fence’s young lieutenant (SAM ROCKWELL).

Moore and his partner, Bobby Blane (Delroy Lindo) and their utility man, Pinky Pincus (Ricky Jay) find themselves broke, betrayed, and blackmailed. Moore is forced to commit his crew to do Bergman’s one Last Big Job.

Will Bergman shop Moore to the police? Will Moore’s wife trade him in for a younger model? Will Blane and Pincus cut their losses and get out? Who is to be believed, who is to be betrayed? Won’t someone who’s lied once, lie again?

Who’s going to walk away smiling, and who’s not going to walk at all?

This is a very entertaining and elegant bullion robbery thriller; it is constructed as cunningly as any top-of-the-range act of criminal daring, and teems with playful, seductive misdirections. It has, in fact, some of the perspective trickery of earlier Mamet movies such as House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, but the emphasis is more on the muscular tension of old-fashioned high-stakes thievery with all its elaborate choreography. Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo, Rebecca Pidgeon and Danny DeVito all get classic Mamet dialogue, firing off zingers like bullets - that is, when they're not actually firing off bullets. Mamet gives a deliciously twisted exchange to Hackman and the unspeakable DeVito as the latter is dying, comparable to Orson Welles' last lines in Touch of Evil.

The Devil's Backbone

What is a ghost? An emotion, a terrible moment condemned to repeat itself over and over? An instant of pain perhaps? Something dead which appears at times alive. A sentiment suspended in time ... like a blurry photograph ... like an insect trapped in amber."

These words, spoken by aged professor Cásares (Luppi), begin the mournful fable of the Santa Lucia School during the last days of the Spanish Civil War. An imposing stone building set on a desolate plateau, the school shelters the orphans of the Republican militia and politicians, and other abandoned children.

Upon his arrival at Santa Lucia, ten-year-old Carlos (Tielve), is confronted with the hostility of Jaime (Garcés), the oldest of the children and clearly the leader of the malnourished troupe of orphans. Besides Cásares, the adult personnel of the school includes Carmen (Paredes), the steely headmistress, widow of a leftist poet; Alma (Ojea), another teacher; Conchita (Visedo), the cook; and the young caretaker Jacinto (Noriega). Aggressive and greedy, Jacinto is filled with hatred for the school that houses him and the teachers that raised him.

Gradually, Carlos uncovers the dark ties that bind the inhabitants of the school, including the secret that haunts them — Santi (Valverde), a student who was brutally murdered, and whose pale ghost now wanders the grounds. Who killed Santi on the night when a bomb from one of the planes in the conflict fell in the center of the courtyard, miraculously without exploding?

The Others

On the secluded Isle of Jersey in the final days of World War II, a young woman waits for her beloved husband to return from the front. Grace (Nicole Kidman) has been raising her two young children alone in a beautiful, cavernous, Victorian mansion, the one place she believes them to be safe.

But they are not safe. Not anymore.

When three new servants arrive to replace the ones that inexplicably disappeared, startling, supernatural events begin to unfold. Grace's daughter reveals she has been communicating with unexplained apparitions. At first, Grace is reluctant to believe in her children's frightening sightings, but soon, she too begins to sense that intruders are at large.

Who are these numinous trespassers? And what do they want from Grace's family? In order to discover the truth, Grace must abandon all of her fears and beliefs and enter the otherworldly heart of the supernatural.

THE OTHERS is, a chilling tale of psychological terror that begs the question of who to trust, what to fear and what to believe

Having something as terrible as a ghost appear to a child was regarded by Henry James as one turn of the screw - to two children, two turns. M Night Shyamalan confirmed the first half of that in The Sixth Sense, and now Alejandro Amenabar completes the axiom with his sturdily old-fashioned and tremendously enjoyable ghost story, set in occupied Jersey in 1945.

As in his previous two films, the Chilean-born Amenabar has written, directed and even composed the musical score - how many auteurs can say as much? This is his first English-language film and one of the scariest things about it is just how fluent Amenabar is in period English. This is a 29-year-old born in Santiago; he has lived mostly in Spain, yet he dashes off lines such as "Cowardy cowardy custard!" like a master. Has he had secret coaching from Anthony Buckeridge or JK Rowling? (Amenabar says he loved Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton as a child - enough to read them in the original, I guess.)

His leading lady is Nicole Kidman, as Grace, the Catholic mistress of a gaunt old country seat, denuded of most of its traditional household staff, though not its heavy furniture and oppressive atmosphere. She is waiting for her husband to return from the war - a conflict for which he volunteered. This abandonment is the source of much unstated grief and reproach.

Alone, Kidman manages their two young children with a natural patrician severity. It is a manner she transfers, only slightly modified, to addressing the staff: three sinister characters who arrive at the beginning of the film to replace servants who have (mysteriously) fled: Fionnula Flanagan as the housekeeper-cum-nanny, Elaine Cassidy as the mute skivvy, and, of all people, Eric Sykes, playing it dead-straight as the gardener.

All of them must be instructed in the strange eternal darkness in which they live: the children's photosensitive condition means they must always be locked indoors, exposed to nothing stronger than candlelight. The newcomers' arrival coincides with uncanny happenings and noises: the trembling of a chandelier, the sound of Chopin coming from the empty music room with its locked grand piano - and then Grace's daughter Anne calmly, in fact rather crossly, announcing that she is being bothered at night by a small ghostly boy called Victor who sometimes teases, sometimes cries uncontrollably.

Kidman gives a very beautiful, statuesque performance as Grace, exquisitely turned out by designer Sonia Grande in a sumptuous pastiche of 1940s English tailoring: a thousand times better cut and better designed than anything she could have got hold of at the time. There is one scene in which, roused in panic from her bed, Kidman displays some very spiffy silk pyjamas and an elegant, loosely tied dressing gown. Perhaps only she, among the A-list leading ladies, has the height to carry off this ensemble.

Her glacial stare, furious, afraid - or both - is the most pointed thing about this performance, sometimes deployed so that those glassy eyes each contain a tiny reflection of the flickering lamp that she has pulled up to her face in the dark. It is either addressed straight to the camera, or sometimes in profile, so that we can see Kidman's distinctive, even characterful nose: a little too prominent to be snub. This is the sexiest she has ever been, by far.

But it is Kidman's relationship with the children which is the real joy of the film. Anne and Nicholas, played by Alakina Mann and James Bentley, are excellent in a pert and unselfconsciously knowing way that I haven't seen since the heyday of BBC teatime drama. Nicholas is cowering, placid, demanding on his mama's attentions and affections; Anne is clever, mature, contemptuous of the silliness of children and grownups. Mann and Bentley have a charm wholly absent from the humourless, self-important demeanour of Haley Joel Osment. With Kidman they have some terrific scenes in which they quarrel over Bible stories and the instructions that Anne gets in preparation for her first holy communion - cleverly combining humour with a miasma of guilt and fear of judgment and the afterlife.

The cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe doesn't stray far from classic generic boundaries: the fast, swooping shot up a gloomy corridor, accompanied by Amenabar's pleasingly trad shuddering violins, the shocking, disorientating encounter with the face in the mirror, then turning to the distraught original - all these moves are brought off in with great style and confidence, and he has a coolly heart-stopping scene in which a glowering face in the dark turns out to be the portrait of some distant civil war ancestor. Managed with less skill, it might have been absurd; here it delivers an effectively nasty jab.

What a relief to have a scary movie instead of a Scary Movie - no boring irony, no tiresome inverted commas. It is well constructed, as opposed to incompetently deconstructed. Whether or not you are actually scared depends on a willing susceptibility. But providing that submission is accomplished - well, many is the pleasurable and invigorating frisson to be had

A Time for Drunken Horses

The story takes place in a remote, mountainous area near the Iran-Iraq border in the Kurdish region of Iran. Ayoub, a hard-working adolescent, along with his three sisters and two brothers live a harsh life of economic deprivation. Their mother is dead and their smuggler father is away. Every day Ayoub and other village boys compete for a trip to a small town, where they are used for an assortment of odd jobs, including smuggling goods under their clothes.

Ayoub and his impoverished family face a new hardship when the local doctor tells them their handicapped brother, Madi, is critically ill and will die unless they take him to town for a hospital operation. Although they are told the operation will prolong Madi's life for only a few months, the family is determined to help Madi. Ayoub hopelessly tries but fails to raise money. His elder sister, Rojin, agrees to marry an Iraqi Kurd across the border on the condition that the groom's family pay for her brother's operation in Iraq.

Upon the bridal party's arrival, the groom's mother refuses to accept Madi, and after a heated argument, they give a mule in compensation to Rojin's family. Ayoub joins a group of smugglers to cross the border into Iraq to sell the mule for Madi's operation. The freezing, snow-covered mountain terrain in the war zone is so treacherous that the smugglers have to intoxicate their horses to move them.

Amores Perros

The opening car-chase sequence of this movie delivers the kind of unapologetic rocket-fuelled rush of excitement not experienced since the days of Tarantino in the early 1990s. Three inhabitants of a car are being chased through Mexico City by a gun-wielding gang in a truck. One of them, Cofi, whimpering and shuddering with pain, has taken a bullet; Luis is pressing his hand up against the wound to staunch the flow of blood.

The problem is that Cofi is a dog, the pampered champ of a high-rolling dogfight, and has just been made the subject of what amounts to an unsuccessful assassination attempt by a rival trainer in the middle of a contest; it's an incident which has led to the inevitable grisly confrontation between two sponsors of the sport of underworld kings.

This corrida of the criminal classes was hinted at, very cautiously, in Guy Ritchie's film Snatch, when Brick Top leads his associates through a terrible lock-up, gesturing negligently at a canine corpse surrounded by glum Crombie-wearing men: "D'you like a good dogfight?" he inquires genially. But how extraordinary to think of the fuss made about the teeny little pastoral moments of animal violence in that film compared to the gobsmackingly candid dog-on-dog action seen here. The dog fight scenes, although somehow always contriving to keep the gut-wrenching coup de garce off screen, are nevertheless quite explicit enough to be going on with.

And in the best Tarantino tradition, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu makes the eventual crash, which effectively seals the fate of Cofi and his two handlers, the crux of two other storylines, each finding their own fateful moment in the accident. These sub-plots are duly interwoven with the main plot, though notably more loosely - and with far less narrative/perspective trickery - than in Tarantino's films or in imitations such as Doug Liman's comedy Go, or, more recently, Harald Zwart's One Night at McCool's.

The crash distracts a guerrilla-turned-hobo-hitman, El Chivo (Emilio Echevarria), from carrying out a murder; his family crisis is revealed as he pursues a commission to kill a businessman on behalf of the prospective victim's own brother. And the driver of the other car involved in the crash is a beautiful and highly strung young model, Valeria (Goya Toledo), who has just persuaded a middle-aged man to leave his wife and daughters. Both of these plots involve dogs - dogs are the motif and parodic spiritual centre of each.

Valeria is obsessed with her small lapdog, Richie, which disappears through a hole in the floor of the love-nest apartment and can't get out. She can hear the luckless beast, scrabbling and whimpering under the floor, symbolising her persistent low-level anxiety and acting as a presentiment of future calamity - a telltale heart of disaster.

El Chivo himself has a posse of dogs, and tending to them constitutes the sum total of his emotional life. They symbolise his misanthropy and alienation: a sense of gloomy estrangement which becomes clearer as his own unhappy family drama is brought into the story. When he sees the crash, El Chivo carries Cofi away with him, and nurses him back to some sort of health.

Inarritu presents this as an act of charity - almost one of grace - in a world where dogs have come to look like our deracinated souls. And Cofi himself, the mute and dignified hero of the story, becomes a metonym for the sufferings of his handler and professional associate, Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal). In fact the dog actually belongs to his brother Ramiro (Marco Perez), and Octavio comes to admire Cofi at the same time as he falls in love with his brother's wife Susana - an outstanding performance here from Vanessa Bauche - and conceives the idea of using Cofi's winnings as the means of running away with Susana and starting a new life with her. But this almost incestuous tale of adultery is crowned by its own betrayal, and Octavio's love agonies are to find their ultimate expression in Cofi's dripping bullet wounds: the stigmata of pain, incomprehension and suffering.

Inarritu and his cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, have created a flickering, sun-bleached look for this tale of the barrio in the world's biggest city - a look similar to the Diesel ads or the desert glare that you saw in the old Foster Grant commercials before the tinted lens is lowered, and similar in some ways to the Mexican sequences in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. It's the sort of "style filter" which, through being continuously present, provides a persistent, subtle abrasion in the viewing experience.

At two and a half hours, Amores Perros is a long watch, and the storylines are arguably not married together as adroitly, or as ingeniously, as in Pulp Fiction, often looking like three novellas bolted together - despite what the director has said were 36 rewrites of Guillermo Arriaga's original screenplay. But it's a crackingly powerful picture: film-making with high-octane virility.

Together

Lukas Moodysson's first feature, Fucking Amal or Show Me Love, won lots of hearts with its comic yet swooningly fervent study of a smalltown girl-on-girl love affair. His new feature is a brilliant expansion of film-making scope, despite being conceived on the same domestic, suburban lines. It is an almost perfect light comedy: funny, original, touchingly tender, with superbly managed modulations of tone between laughs and tears.

Together is about a commune in Sweden in 1975, occupied by a bunch of hippies who give their children names like Tet, after the Tet Offensive. They are wearing those special 1970s jumpers, and carrying the woollen shoulder bags that, as Martin Amis once wrote, appear to have been woven out of snot. Their merry utopia is called Tillsammans or Together - that is how they solemnly answer the phone - and it has its very own horrific VW camper van with an appalling mural-type decoration. When two of its inhabitants defect to the rival "Mother Earth" commune, a similar VW van arrives to pick them up with its own mother earth logo and hippie imagery.

Tensions escalate when the commune's bearded and saintly leader Goran, played by Gustaf Hammarsten, persuades the overcrowded community to accept his sister Elisabeth (Lisa Lindgren), a battered wife with a bruised face, a split lip and two children.

Apart from the use of Abba's SOS on the soundtrack, permissible given the setting, there are no stock cliches to denote the period. It's not about the wacky music or clothes, but about the more depressing real life of the 1970s: the instantly familiar atmosphere of wearied political idealism - from which Moodysson conjures gentle and compassionate human comedy.

A keynote scene takes place in the kitchen where the Together commune bicker ferociously about whose turn it is to do the washing up, and whether or not washing up is bourgeois anyway. One complains about the behaviour of Together's lesbian member, Anna (Jessica Liedberg), and we pull back to see that Anna is naked from the waist down. "I have a fungal infection," she complains righteously, showing what look like very 1970s Alex Comfort pubes: not waxed or trimmed but luxuriously foliant. Anna's ex-partner Lasse (Ola Norell) belligerently insists on the right to show his genitals and pulls down his trousers and pants, as Goran nervously ushers in Elisabeth and her children to introduce them to their new housemates, just in time to see Lasse's unlovely flaccid penis.

It is a very funny scene, and one which cleverly introduces a key issue of the time for the forces of reaction: does hippyism with its yearning for a child-like state of innocence, actually corrupt real children with drugs and sexual incontinence? (The prosecution of Oz magazine, for example, strategically focused on the Kids' Issue.) The children in Together are a great joy; little Tet plays make-believe games of "Pinochet" with Elisabeth's son Stefan: it means taking turns to torture each other with pretend electrodes while shouting: "Do you love Pinochet?" - "No! No!" But Stefan brings into the house forbidden commercial fripperies like Lego. Tet says sadly that his father offered to whittle him two blocks of Lego from wood - an unimaginable cruelty, worthy of a Viz comic Liberal Parent.

Moodysson keeps his story moving with the perpetual motion of churning sexual anxiety: Anna's adoration of Elisabeth, the anguish of Klas, played by Shanti Roney, and his gay obsession with Lasse, Goran's agonised "open" relationship with Lena (Anja Lundqvist) - who fancies the humourless radical Erik (Olle Sarri), who in turn only gives her an orgasm on condition that they discuss Marxist-Leninist theory afterwards. It is a seething pot which comes to the boil when Lena unsuccessfully attempts to seduce a 14-year-old boy from a "normal" household next door, a tricky scene which Moodysson brings off very adroitly. Throughout, Moodysson conveys the fact that the children are not corrupted - but, natural conservatives that they are, they furiously resent the lack of proper TV, toys, meat etc.

In counterpoint to this uproarious drama and comedy, Moodysson brings out the desperate loneliness of Rolf, the abusive but penitent husband left behind - a terrific performance from Michael Nyqvist. He is a plumber, who is continually being called out on spurious jobs by Birger, played by Sten Ljunggren, just to have someone to have a chat with - another sad case of a man whose wife has left him and whose life is in a mess.

What prevents Moodysson's commune from being simply a sitcom (and incidentally makes it more interesting than the icily facetious caricature in Lars Von Trier's The Idiots) is the warmth and sympathy with which everyone is conceived. He makes communal living look absurd, conceited, more than a little squalid, and riven with what its grown-up children would decades later call political correctness.

But its "togetherness", however chaotic, finally looks like an answer to loneliness, and an alternative of sorts to the un- acknowledged unhappiness of much conventional family life. At its best it was a form of extended family in itself, and Moodysson is generous enough - and sentimental enough - to see it at its best. Were people really like that? Did they really worry about revolution and the washing up? Did they really behave like that? Perhaps they did.