Commune

last updated 8 January 2015

Black Bear Ranch, formed in 1968, was one of the last real communes of the hippie era, said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. Jonathan Berman's documentary gathers old home movies and interviews former members in search of an accurate picture of the commune. He doesn't quite get one, because his source material is inherently biased, but Commune is still a 'œfascinating spectacle.' Utopia, especially during the first winter, was difficult to achieve without farming skills. But Black Bear survived, even though it abandoned some of its original tenets, such as enforced free love. The former communalists look back on the camp with both affection and regret, said Andrew O'Hehir in Salon.com. Those hippies who returned to the mainstream 'œseem no better or worse than the rest of us,' except for their new survival skills. If nothing seems weird about them, it's because 'œall is bathed in a nostalgic glow,' said James Bowman in The New York Sun. What about the parents who treated their children like lab rats in this free-love experiment? Berman is far too uncritical of his subject to make a proper film about it.

Rating: Not Rated