The Commune, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000264s/the-commune

Nudity, whoopty whoo. This film was alright. It was kinda you get what you deserve. It began with a man and women, Erik and Anna moving into a big house in the 1970s, the end of the hippy era, with their adolescent daughter, Freja. It’s her idea to set up a commune in Copenhagen. He’s more pragmatic. The house is too expensive, his childhood home, but they can’t even afford to heat it, even though both of them are in good, well-paying, jobs. She’s a newsreader and he’s a lecturer on design and architect. She thinks it will be fun and calls him a bit of a fuddy-duddy. He resists, but relents. We go through the selection process, who the tenants will be and, in that way, it’s predictable. Middle-class twaddle. But then he meets one of his students, a third-year girl and they begin an affair. They fall for each other and his wife who thought it might be fun, finds out that it’s no fun at all. We witness her unraveling. There’s a side story about her daughter hooking up with another adolescent she fancies. And a story about a young boy brought to the commune by his hippy mum and dad, who has heart disease and telling anybody that would listen that he was going to die before he was nine. There are some false alarms, but when he does die at dinner, with everybody around the table, it’s not totally unexpected. I cared when Anna, the newsreader, had a breakdown and lost her job. I guess that’s the elements of a good film. Job done.