Everybody get together.

Following the teen courtship of Show life Love with the amorous radicals in his new work, Together, filmmaker Lukas Moodysson admits he's a romantic

"I played ABBA in kindergarten," writer-director Lukas Moodysson confesses unabashedly--so it's only fitting that the irrepressible pop group's anthem "SOS" plays over the opening credits of his new film, Together, sending up an ironic distress call, signaling that the movie's would--be idealists aren't as peacefully happy as they might pretend.

Set in 1975 in a Swedish commune where TV, meat, and even the celebration of Christmas are all banned as "bourgeois," individuality is breaking out all over, threatening the very group ethos that the commune is trying to enforce. And among those notions under siege is the very assumption of heterosexuality.

Anna (Jessica Liedberg), for example, has decided she's a lesbian, although her ex-husband Lasse (Ola Norell) insists she's just staking out a provocative, political pose. Does her pursuit of Elisabeth (Lisa Lindgren), a mother of two seeking shelter from an abusive husband, represent genuine passion or just capricious experimentation? "I don't think it's possible or important to make that division between the two categories," Moodysson argues. "Many people do make important and crucial decisions in their lives for really small reasons. I think Anna is looking for different things; I'm not sure Anna finds the right thing for her, but the way she is looking for it is really honest."

On the other hand, Lasse, while trying to stifle his hetero jealousy, finds himself the object of spontaneous affections from the gay Klas (Shanti Roney) and unexpectedly finds himself succumbing to the idea of life with another man. "I just think it's one of those few--but strange--situations where everything falls into place. I think they really do fall into love," the 32-year-old director testifies. "But then, I'm a romantic."

Moodysson, speaking by phone from his home in Malmo, Sweden, where the married father of two young sons lives, is also a genuinely empathetic soul. His first feature film, a hit on the gay film festival circuit two years ago, was released in Sweden under the title Fucking Amal, a disparaging reference to the boring town in which it takes place. Distributed in the United States under the less provocative moniker Show Me Love, it focused on two high school girls who escape their ennui by finding each other. "That film was extremely easy to write," he reports. "It was not about my own life, but I put a lot of my teenage angst into it. It was very close to myself even though I was not a girl or a lesbian.

"I didn't want it to be seen as a film that was `important,' because if a film is labeled `important,' then kids don't want to see it," he says of the movie's reception in Sweden, where it proved to be a hit. "But I've actually seen statistics that showed that the year the film was out in the cinemas, young people's attitudes [toward homosexuality] changed. For me it was a big victory and a big proof that you really can change the world by making a film."

It's also evidence that despite the skeptical eye he casts in Together on the idealism of what was once called the counterculture, that idealism lives on for Moodysson.

Kilday is film editor at The Hollywood Reporter and also writes for Premiere.