(If you haven’t already, please be sure to check out Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 1 for a series explanation and to read the first batch of reflections.)

Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 4

I saw Chuck & Buck in one of those perfect bubbles of unawareness—no preparation whatsoever. Ten minutes into it my companions and I were shooting bug-eyed glances at each other as we realized just what kind of tightrope we’d stepped onto—shock on one side, gut-busting hilarity on the other. Total exhilaration. The biggest shock came toward the end when I realized this strange cringe-fest of a comedy was turning out to be one of the deepest, wisest, most human movies I’d ever seen. Since then I’ve recommended it everywhere (one friend went to see it on a first date; she still hasn’t forgiven me). Chuck & Buck is one of those rare, small-miracle movies that come out every once and a while to remind you of how ridiculously powerful this medium can be. — Lisa Krueger (Committed, Manny & Lo)

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Long Gone (David Eberhardt, Jack Cahill) — This film is not perfect, but the story of it is. Two guys with cameras ran into each other hopping trains across America and joined forces. For seven years they rode the rails with the last of a dying breed of hobos and encountered a new generation. In the end they made a film… I wasn’t as captivated by the filmmaking as by the document itself—and what that document spoke for as a remnant of a greater experience. I saw Long Gone at our college film festival, which may be the last place it was ever seen. It never made it to DVD. I met David after the screening and he spent the next two months living on our couch. In payment he got me my first real film job. The paths of my life and the lives in my periphery have all been greatly changed due to that singular encounter—a handshake and a cigarette outside of a movie theater. — Turner Ross (45365)

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I went to see Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny alone in a short-lived art-house in Washington DC. I remember it was the middle of the day because it was light outside before and after the movie. The yuppie girls in front of me, maybe the only other people in the theater, giggled constantly beforehand and throughout its notorious climactic scene, yawning the rest of the time. But, fuck them. Past its self-perpetrated controversies (the Winona/Kirsten firings, the curse on Roger Ebert’s colon, that billboard, etc.) is a beautifully executed, tender and truthful film about loss. I can watch it anytime. More audacious than von Trier, sparser than Van Sant and DIY to the core, this is the movie that the American indie scene has been trying to catch up with since. It also has one of the best of the best trailers of the decade (losing to the Hills Have Eyes 2 teaser, which totally rips it off…) and I think the press kit came with a DVD of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. — Zach Clark (Modern Love is Automatic)

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Nanette Burstein’s American Teen encompasses everything that I hate about the current state of documentaries. Every time I see it on the video store shelf I drop kick the box. Lately my leg has grown so tired I’ve had to ask my brothers for assistance. — Bill Ross (45365)

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Tillsammans, the early-Aughties second feature directed by Lukas Moodysson, was released in America as Together. Moodysson’s previous feature—Show Me Love/Fucking Amal—was a same-sex teen crush film that felt so raw and dead-on accurate about adolescent longing, it was like a film John Hughes might have made if he were a bit more daring—and Swedish. However, it’s Together—which is about the members of a Stockholm commune in 1975—that I’ve probably watched more than any other film from the 2000s.

Together has no central character, though it finds emotional centers in Goran (whose good-heartedness and desire to please everyone reaches a boiling point when he realizes he’s just not okay with his girlfriend’s open-relationship policy—which includes sleeping around and describing her orgasms), Eva (a near-adolescent girl, who moves into the commune with her abused mother and brother and learns about romance by watching the intra-commune fumblings), and Rolf (Eva’s father—an alcoholic who can’t get his act together, but desperately misses his family, and finds the prospect of living alone terrifying).

The film deals with all the obvious themes—left-wing politics, sexual exploration, vegetarianism, ABBA—but the real subject of Together is the limitations of sharing, of being an individual in a community, and the shortcomings of well-intentioned progressivism.

Everyone in Together wants to be good, tries to be a compassionate, giving, forgiving person, but sometimes their feelings—and their very humanity—gets in the way:

Nobody wants to hear his girlfriend cry over another man; nobody wants to see her ex-husband happier with another person (in this case, a man); nobody wants to be harassed by a humorless Marxist; nobody wants to be alone.

The beauty of Together is that it doesn’t try to skewer anyone and doesn’t traffic in archetypes. The film’s characters are human, and they actually love and hurt, and somehow this effortless tapestry blends a handful of stories without showing the perspiration of other multi-plot films (say, for example, Crash). When I watch Together, I’m in awe of the multiple perspectives, the beautiful performances, the perfect use of music, the curious camera, and the bright 1970s colors (Red! Yellow!).

I like to just turn on Together and live in the world of the movie, hang out for a while—like the film’s characters, I wish life could just be easy, and people could be their best selves to each other.

It’s worth noting that Lukas Moodysson followed Together with 2002’s devastating sex-trade film, Lilya 4-ever, and then, in 2004, made the semi-experimental, DV-shot A Hole in My Heart—which is about the making of a low-budget porno, and features, amongst other things, insert shots of vaginal reconstruction surgery. The film’s abrasive tone and desire to de-sexualize porn was bold but alienated many audiences (I was at one of the first American screenings, and more than half the audience walked out). The arc of Moodysson’s career—from Show Me Love to A Hole In My Heart—suggests an exploration of romantic love (as well as the representations, exploitations, and cheapening of love). Teenage crushes are a lot easier to stomach than hardcore porn, though.

Together, a film from the 2000s that I can endlessly re-watch, suggests that the desire to please other people and compromise for the good of the group is admirable—but has its limitations for the individual. And if that individual is an artist, like Moodysson, perhaps visions of romantic love—an Age of Aquarius staple (even if the hippies of Together are living in the ’70s)—were perhaps, by the downloadable 2000s, the stuff of nostalgia. To me, Moodysson is a brave, curious filmmaker, interested in understanding and depicting the differences between love—and just fucking. — James Ponsoldt (Off the Black)

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ALSO READ:

Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 1
Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 2
Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 3
Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 5

Tags: 1970s, 45365, A Hole In My Heart, ABBA, American Teen, Bill Ross, Chuck & Buck, Committed, communes, Crash, David Eberhardt, Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s, Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 4, Fucking Amal, Jack Cahill, James Ponsoldt, John Hughes, Kirsten Dunst, Lars von Trier, Lilya 4-ever, Lisa Krueger, Long Gone, Lukas Moodysson, Manny & Lo, Modern Love is Automatic, Nanette Burstein, Off the Black, Show Me Love, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, The Brown Bunny, The Hills Have Eyes 2, Tillsammans, Together, Turner Ross, Van Sant, Vincent Gallo, Winona Ryder, Zach Clark