Together

Together

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Millie and Tim seen from below

Alison Brie and Dave Franco are a couple in real life and in excitable quarters this fact alone earns Together extra kudos. It’s a talking point, but the Brie/Franco connection doesn’t otherwise make any difference to this movie. They are fine, separately and together, as people whose too-close relationship shifts from the figurative to the literal in a dire and grisly way. We know this before it happens because a pre-credits sequence has told us so, in a tone-setting mini-drama in which two separate dogs have wound up fused together in a gruesomely icky way. Which is what’s coming down the pipe for Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco) once they head out into … Read more

Together

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James McAvoy squats in the kitchen

Together is a select member of a new genre – the Covid Drama – and sees Sharon Horgan back working again with Dennis Kelly. Together they co-wrote Pulling, the TV relationship comedy that made both their names. Kelly went on to create and write the TV conspiracy thriller Utopia and Horgan to co-write the popular comedy series Catastrophe. This time around he writes, she acts (though you can’t rule out the possibility that there’s a fair amount of improvising going on too). Flipping the actual experience of many people – who found that the whole Covid experience (particularly the lockdowns in the UK) caused their relationship to buckle – Together is a funny/angry examination of a married … Read more

Together aka Tillsammans

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together

There’s something very funny and fairly tragic about Lukas Moodysson’s 2000 film set on a Swedish commune called Tillsammans (or Together, in English). It’s set in 1975, just as the Spanish dictator Franco has been declared dead and follows what happens when Elisabeth, an abused woman and her children arrive and are taken in, grudgingly, by a gang of virtuous, or so they think, communards on a big experiment in free living outside Stockholm. Liberal idealism is at its peak and nurture has the philosophical upper hand over nature. The lentil-eaters believe that lesbianism is a political choice, not a predisposition,  that sexual love should come with no emotional baggage and that washing-up … Read more