Reviews Round-up: The Commune, Author: The JT Leroy Story, Barry Lyndon

A disintegrating marriage, one of the literary world's strangest stories, and a Kubrick classic restored

The Commune (15)

★★★☆☆

Dir: Thomas Vinterberg, 112 mins, starring: Trine Dyrholm, Ulrich Thomsen, Fares Fares, Julie Agnete Vang

Danish director Vinterberg’s drama may be set in a commune in early 1970s Copenhagen but it is more in the spirit of The Good Life than of Haight-Ashbury Flower Power or the Summer of Love. The idea for everyone to live together comes from a middle-class, professional couple. Erik (Thomsen) is an architecture professor.

His wife Anna (Dyrholm) is a newscaster. They have a precocious teenage daughter Freja (Martha Sofie Wallstrøm Hansen). Unable to afford to live in Erik’s family home, they decide to “call more people” and to create an extended family.

At first, all goes swimmingly but then Erik begins an affair with a 24-year-old student Emma (Helene Reingaard Neumann), who looks like she’s an actress from “a French romantic movie”. She moves into the home and Anna, Erik’s wife, slowly goes into meltdown.

As so often in his work, Vinterberg invokes the spirit of Ingmar Bergman. There is yet another scene of the extended family holding hands and dancing around the house (a clear reference to a famous moment in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander). The film also often plays like a reworking of Scenes From a Marriage, Bergman’s probing and very bleak psycho-drama about a couple whose relationship has turned rotten at its core.

Vinterberg is so preoccupied with Erik and Anna that he treats the rest of the characters in a surprisingly cursory fashion. Among the others in the household is a little boy with a weak heart who doesn’t think he is going to live beyond the age of nine, an odd job man (Fares Fares) who breaks down in tears at the slightest excuse and Erik’s hard-drinking and very chaotic bohemian friend Ole (Lars Ranthe).

The residents hold their meetings around the dining table. They talk as earnestly about beer bills and dishwashing machines as they do about relationships and evictions.

Thomsen and Dyrnholm give exceptional performances as the couple whose marriage flounders in spite of their affection for one another and determination always to do the right thing. They seem so grounded and sensible that it is all the more shocking when both begin to behave so erratically. The commune, they soon discover, isn’t any kind of Eden after all.

Author: The JT Leroy Story (15)

★★★☆☆

Dir: Jeff Feuerzeig, 111 mins, featuring: Laura Albert, Bruce Benderson, Dennis Cooper, Panio Gianopoulos

The JT Leroy story is a rich and very perplexing one. This documentary unpicks the many strands in a literary hoax that still defies easy explanation. Leroy was the Arthur Rimbaud-like visionary young American author from the Midwest whose mother was supposedly a truck-stop prostitute. Celebrities loved him.

He turned up at literary events and film premieres dressed in baggy trousers, a big hat and sunglasses. Leroy, in fact, never existed at all. “His” writing was done by Laura Albert, a talented but troubled 40-year-old mum from Brooklyn, still traumatised at being bullied as an overweight kid.

Leroy himself was “played” by Albert’s androgynous sister in law, Savannah Knoop. Over time, Albert and Knoop became as taken in as the general public by their own creation. They believed in Leroy so implicitly that so did everybody else.

Knoop turned out to be a brilliant performance artist with a touch of Andy Warhol about her. Albert was like a punkish Walter Mitty but one who shunned the limelight. Feuerzeig has access to many of the telephone conversations between Leroy (actually Albert) and her many admirers; Tom Waits, Gus Van Sant, Courtney Love and Asia Argento among them.

The film raises all sorts of questions about fame, authorship and gender politics. On the one hand, this was a case of the emperor’s new clothes. On the other, Albert was a talented writer and can justifiably claim that her books should be judged on their own merits, not on the basis of her biography. She points out that her work was always presented as fiction.

The JT Leroy persona was just an extension of the storytelling. However, when she was finally unmasked, the celebrities who had championed JT Leroy’s work were indignant. The documentary doesn’t draw any particular conclusion about Albert’s behaviour but it is a fascinating account of a case that still confounds those most closely involved in it.

Barry Lyndon (12A)

★★★★★

Dir: Stanley Kubrick, 177 mins, starring: Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger, Steven Berkoff

This digitally restored version of Kubrick’s 1976 masterpiece still astounds, both in its formal accomplishments and in its searing emotional charge.

Adapted from a Thackeray novel, it’s a cautionary tale about a rake’s progress. Redmond Barry (played with swagger and mounting pathos by O’Neal) is an Irish rogue and a chancer but also someone strangely naive and with an unlikely streak of decency.

After misadventures in the army and as a gambler, Redmond marries into money, seducing the beautiful Countess Lyndon (Berenson) but can’t ward off tragedy in his private life. Kubrick lit the film’s interiors using candles and went to extraordinary lengths to ensure period authenticity. Every frame of every battle scene or courtly interlude is exhaustively and exquisitely detailed.