Communes are certainly not things of the past; still the new Swedish film Together (IFC) has the air of a souvenir. Set in Stockholm in 1975, most of it takes place in a large suburban house, called "Together," where some people live communally. Or as communally as they can. All that they share is the wish to live together, in anti-bourgeois egalitarian terms; but politically and otherwise, they are a mixed lot.

The writer-director was Lukas Moodysson, who was born in 1969, and if he was not a child in such a commune, with some first-hand experience of it, it is hard to think why he would have wanted to make this picture. His directing is smooth; his work with actors--particularly children--is evocative; his characters are understood; but the only comprehensible impulse to make this film at this late date is a wish to unburden oneself.

In the very first shot a man named Goran, the most maturely balanced of the group as it turns out, is listening to the radio when Franco's death is announced. Goran tells the others, jubilation fizzes up, and out of this celebration we meet those others. They include a proselytizing young Communist; a woman who has divorced her husband because she feels politically committed to lesbianism; her ex-husband, who seems to just float around cynically; and Goran's girlfriend, who has an open relationship with him that allows her to sleep with the Communist. (And to have her first orgasm. Those devious Reds!) Soon the commune is joined by Goran's sister, a bourgeois housewife with two children who is fleeing her drunken, battering husband. In the next house live a conventional family who at first merely spy with binoculars but soon become involved.

All the cast are fitted into their roles like astronauts into their space suits, but once we become acquainted with these characters, we know pretty much how they are going to speak and behave along the way. The odd contradiction is that the affectionate relationship between two of the children--the battered wife's thirteen-year-old daughter and the neighbors' fourteen-year-old son--is the most familiar of the lot and yet the most taking.

Brimful of feeling as all these people are, tenderly reminiscent as Moodysson is, the effect of the film is less sympathy than irritation. The impulse to withdraw from the sullied world, à la Thoreau but with sex, touches remembrances of youthful impatience with the world as it is. But the fakery involved in this withdrawal from society's patterns is irritating. The group will not have Coca-Cola in the house because they want to resist corporate globalization, but they drive a station wagon. That car was not made by some village tinker, and the fuel for the car was not cranked up from a neighbor's oil well.

The picture ends with an impromptu game of football (soccer to us) in which all the members of the cast, commune members and others, romp together. It is much like the finale of a feel-good musical, in which people who have had troubles for two hours are enfolded in a rosy finish. That game puts the cap on it. Despite the scrabblings toward good-hearted truth in Together, it is basically pernicious, glibly analgesic, and misleading. It is drugging without drugs.

In art of any kind, simplicity is tough. Complicated. To begin with, it comes in numerous shades. For instance, Woody Allen's latest, about the jade scorpion, has the simplicity of a sophisticate on holiday from, as he thinks, his usual profundity. At the other end of the spectrum are such films as Tender Mercies and The Straight Story, whose quiet strength comes from humility in the face of grave subjects and from the dignity that restraint can inspire.

Another simplicity, an atmosphere rooted in a culture, is the signet of recent films from Iran. Many of them deal with children (we are told that Iranian film-makers focus often on children because they can thus avoid trouble with the censorious government), but some of them have treated other matters, not least the subjugation of women. Whatever the subject, whatever the heavy governmental breathing down artists' necks, something in Iranian culture nourishes the idea of simplicity in art, of largeness achieved by concentration rather than by size. It is, strangely enough, as if they had all read their Blake and could see the world in a grain of sand.

Djomeh (New Yorker) is not among the best of the Iranian imports--its thematic compass is smaller--but it certainly shares some of the attributes of the best: patience and a belief that every human face is important. This film was written and directed by Hassan Yektapanah, who has been an assistant to Abbas Kiarostami, and he shows, beneficially, the influence of that master.

Djomeh is a twenty-year-old Afghani emigre in Iran who has left his own country because of troubles in love. He works now on a small dairy farm owned by a man named Mahmoud, works hard and lives simply. Djomeh has seen--but, in our sense of the word, has not met--a girl named Setareh, the daughter of a shopkeeper in a nearby village, and he is smitten. Most of the story is concerned with his efforts to propose to her, efforts that must proceed through a fixed protocol. The conclusion of the story is, in a way, embodied in the story throughout.

Plentiful films have treated the subject of star-crossed love, love between persons of different races or religions or politics. But Djomeh is much less a love story than an account of the self, Djomeh's self: who he is, how he hopes and cares, his persistence in a quest that would be difficult in any case but is aggravated by his foreignness in this country. Before the finish, we can almost see the filaments of society that are holding him in place. He has a fate, a future, in which loneliness will have some part.

Many of the directing touches reflect the filmic milieu in which Yektapanah has grown. With his cinematographer, Ali Loghmani, he enlists the brown landscape in his drama. And he often uses an automobile interior as particularized space, for dialogue between the driver of a car and the person next to him. This is hardly a novel idea in the world of film, but when it is used as a kind of pressure chamber, the way that Kiarostami used it in A Taste of Cherry, it intensifies relationships. The core of such scenes is not camera cleverness, but the humanity to be found in the characters--thus in the director's choice of actors. In this case the actors are Jalil Nazari as Djomeh and Mahmoud Behraznia as his boss. They are not virtuoso actors by our standards; rather, they seem to be persons committed, as the director is, to a hope for revelation, instead of display. Since actors of this humanistic concentration are often found in Iranian films, we have to wonder where they come from. Is there a corps of such actors from which a director can draw? Or does he, as Robert Bresson did, find individuals whom he thinks apt and, with empathy and time, draw out of them as much of a performance as the film needs?

STANLEY KAUFFMANN is TNR's Film Critic.