#178: HALLSTRÖM, Lasse: My Life As A Dog (1985)

HALLSTRÖM, Lasse (Sweden)

My Life As A Dog [1985]

Spine #178
Blu-ray

My Life as a Dog tells the story of Ingemar, a twelve-year-old from a working-class family sent to live with his uncle in a country village when his mother falls ill. There, with the help of the warmhearted eccentrics who populate the town, the boy finds both refuge from his misfortunes and unexpected adventure. Featuring an incredibly mature and unaffected performance by the young Anton Glanzelius, this film is a beloved and bittersweet evocation of the struggles and joys of childhood from Oscar-nominated director Lasse Hallström.

101 minutes
Color

Monaural

in Swedish

1:66:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2011

Director/Writers

From the novel by Reidar Jönsson.

Screenplay by Lasse Hallström, Jönsson, Brasse Brännström and Per Berglund.

Hallström was 39 when he directed My Life as a Dog.

The Film

This impressive piece of cinema launched Hallström's career.

Anton Glanzelius (Ingemar Johansson) was 10 years old when he made this film, joining an elite list of young actors who awed the grown-ups:

• Tatum O'Neal (Paper Moon [1973]) {Spine #1241}
• Henry Thomas (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial [1982])
• Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense [1999])
• Anna Paquin (The Piano [1993]) {Spine #1110}

He turns in a naturalistic performance that perfectly blends in with the others, including the young Melinda Kinnaman (Saga).

Additional charismatic turns by Tomas von Brömssen (the uncle) and Anki Liden (the long-suffering mother) add to the emotional depth of Hallström's calm and assured direction.

Ingemar's voice-overs are often accompanied by shots of the starry night sky. He frequently mentions poor Laika, resonating with the film's title.

A short scene repeated several times has Ingemar doing a limb-splaying flop on the beach to make his mother laugh. It is a cherished memory for Ingemar, which fights the darker stuff.

The final scene connects the story with Ingemar's namesake (Johansson) and allows us to date the film to 1959 and earlier.

The uncle is fond of playing a song on the phonograph "Far jag kan inte få upp min kokosnöt" (The Swedish version of "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts"). The lyrics would have resonated with Ingemar: the young narrator, in attempting to open his resilient coconut, demolishes the family's furniture, disfigures his mother, and finally blows up the house!

Film Rating (0-60):

55

The Extras

The Booklet

Eighteen-page booklet featuring essays by Michael Atkinson and Kurt Vonnegut.

Atkinson:

"In contrast to Hollywood filns, the movie contemplates character, behavior, and experience for their own sakes, not in the service of arc or narrative revelation or simpistic heroism. Thus, the community in which Ingemar finds himself as his mother fades, and after his beloved pet dog vanishes, is an enormously complex and convincing bounty of overgrown roads, bustling glassworks, cavernous barns, bizarre mechanics' shops, and half-constructed houses. Likewise, its unpredictable, working-class inhabitants are acrobats, daffy inventors, soccer players, woodworkers, nude models, and ice swimmers. But Hallström never dwells on eccentricity — these lives and this place are only fragmentarily known to us, just as they are to Ingemar, and therefore the film's achievement is something like the evocation of real life, as it happens, for the most part, beyond our ken."

Vonnegut:

"Imagine pitching a story line and concept like this to a studio executive: 'the whole thing is from the viewpoint of this unwanted orphan, a kid who got his dick stuck in a bottle ... he thinks of himself as a dog that has to survive somehow, even though nobody wants him, nobody really cares what happens to him.' Hallström gives us the satisfaction of knowing that in this village, at least, dogs and orphans alike encounter such kindness and love from simple people, and partake with everyone else in sports, and in misadventures so odd and human and hilarious and endearing, that life anywhere else could not be more marvelous."

Commentary

None.

Shall We Go to My or Your Place or Each Go Home Alone?

A 1973 52-minute film by Hallström, with a video introduction by the director.

Delightful. Obviously improvised, young men and women hook up at a club. Some hit it off, some don't. 

Video interview

With Hallström.

Original theatrical trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

39

55 + 35 =

90

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