‘Together 99’ Review: Lukas Moodysson’s Sequel to His Great Swedish Commune Comedy Proves That He’s Now a Misanthrope

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In my opinion, the two greatest directors to emerge from the nexus of international cinema in the 1990s were both Scandinavian.

One of them, Lars von Trier, became quite famous, for reasons both good and bad. (Von Trier the court jester of controversy has always had detractors, but “Breaking the Waves” is one of the great films, and he’s made several more that are major.) The other director I’m speaking of never got famous, and his movies, even during his brief heyday, didn’t become art-house sensations.

Yet for a time, Sweden’s Lukas Moodysson burned with an intoxicating flame. He made three films of astonishing organic craft and humanistic purity: “Show Me Love” (1998), a shockingly lyrical love story about two high-school girls who fall for each other in a small town that didn’t look very tolerantly upon them; “Together” (2000), an ensemble comedy set in a sharehome commune in Stockholm in 1975 that is one of the only films that totally gets the counterculture; and “Lilya 4-ever” (2002), a haunting tragedy about a wayward girl in the former Soviet Union who’s ensnared by sex traffickers.

Moodyssoon had a sublime run, but he also had one of the most jarring fall-offs I’ve ever seen in the career of a major filmmaker. “A Hole in My Heart,” his 2004 oddity about three characters camped out in a disgusting flat trying (sort of) to make an amateur porn video, is one of the most unpleasant movies I ever sat through; it felt like it was made almost as an assault on the audience. (When Moodyssen introduced it at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival, he said, “I think it’s the best movie ever made,” sounding quite serious.) After that, he seemed to lose his touch, making the bizarre experimental.