TOGETHER
UK, 2021, 92 minutes, Colour.
James McAvoy, Sharon Horgan, Samuel Logan.
Directed by Stephen Daldrey, Justin Martin.
Together was filmed in 10 days during lockdown. The action is confined to the downstairs of a British house. The cast is confined to a couple who have lived together for many years and their son.
The film has the advantage of performances by James McAvoy (winning a BAFTA award) and Sharon Horgan, both using their own accents, able to manage long speeches as well as repartee and aggressive interactions. The young son is glimpsed at various times, with a concern about him, their praising his resilience, the camera sometimes looking at him and making the audience wonder what effect the lockdown has on him and listening to his parents and their quarrels – and the reconciliations.
The film was written by Dennis Kelly, prolific in writing screenplays for British television. And direction is by Stephen Daldrey, prominent in British theatre but also the director of such films as The Reader.
Together offers an opportunity for those who lived through lockdown, especially in 2020, to remember their own experiences, the confinement, the psychological consequences, not going out without reason. Months during 2020 are highlighted on screen. Audiences will have different reactions and comparisons with their own lives but it seemed there was a rather large jump in the last months of 2020.
While dialogue is very important, the sharpness of the words, the ruminations and speeches, the performances are very striking, James McAvoy as the middle-aged man, used to his own way, falling out of love with his partner, trying to cope, some mean moves, some reprehensible attacks. Sharon Horgan is the middle-aged woman, strong minded in herself, bewildered by the experience, falling out of love with her partner, yet an underlying devotion to him. As the months go by, there are sequences with hostility, not talking to each other, she going out to work, having some kind of outlet, he staying at home, sometimes quietly smouldering. However, by the end of the year, they have had a range of interactions, thought again about their meeting initially, their past together, their child, whether they loved each other, whether they know each other now – leading to a positive outcome of the experience of coronavirus and of lockdown, British style.
