SnoopyStyle It's 1958 Sweden. Young boy Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius) is living with his older brother and his seriously ill mother. His best friend is a blonde little girl. The brothers are sent away when their mother gets too weak. Ingemar goes to live with his mother's odd brother Gunnar (von Brömssen) and his wife Ulla (Kicki Rundgren) in a rural town in Småland. Town tomboy Saga (Melinda Kinnaman) is a better athlete than every other boys and she grows to like Ingemar.The puppy love is adorable. This is a cute and a good deal of inappropriate coming-of-age story. It is hilarious at times. Kinnaman is funny and adorable especially when she starts getting jealous. The two of them are just adorable together.

bandw Ingemar is on the cusp of adolescence. It is the late 1950s Sweden. When the opening scene showed Ingemar on the beach amusing his mother with some childish antics, I was primed for a happy coming-of-age story. But then it is revealed that Ingemar is living at home with his mother who has tuberculosis. This sets the theme of the movie, just when you think things might be looking up for Ingemar, darker issues arise.Anton Glanzelius, who plays Ingemar, embodies a perfect combination of imp and winsomeness. He can cause adults grief with his trouble-making, but much of the time it is his innocence that gets him into trouble, like the time he has a small fire going in a trash dump that gets out of control, or the time he is suckered into an embarrassing prank at school. He has some odd behaviors, like approaching his milk glass with trepidation as if were one of life's great challenges to drink from it.When Ingemar becomes too much for his mother to handle he is sent to a small village down south to live with his uncle's family. This village has more than its share of eccentrics, like an older guy who is constantly repairing his roof, or the uncle's father who asks Ingemar to read to him from the lingerie section of a catalog. Much of the footage at the uncle's is gentle humor interspersed with typical trials of growing up. But then the mother dies. And so it goes.Ingemar has a delightful philosophical bent. As one way to deal with life's challenges he frequently tries to comfort himself by thinking that things could be worse. He keeps meditating on Laika, the dog that the Soviets sent into space in 1957, the first living animal sent up. In thinking of Laika, Ingemar comments, "You have to compare, so you can keep perspective. It helps to keep a little distance." He frets over the thought that Laika was sent into space knowing that he would most certainly starve to death. Maybe Ingemar sensed a wider metaphorical meaning--in some sense we are all shot into space at birth only ultimately to suffer the fate of certain death. The main musical theme perfectly captures the melancholic mood; its memory is one of the things that drew me to re-watch this after having first seen it over twenty years ago.

georgesfields At the end of the movie one finds out who was the dog whose life is being told. It isn't Laika sent in space at the onset of the movie, but the little boy who identifies with his dog who was put to sleep while he was away at his uncle's place. The little boys is from a modest background, grows up like the rest of the town, and faces problems many faced in those years. In his case his mom was sick and his dad was never home (had he ever been home?). At the uncle's place the boy slowly discovers other facets of the world, never losing his grace. Not much of a plot really. When I first heard about it, I thought this movie was going to suck big times, but my girlfriend of the time insisted to go see it. She was right. It isn't the plot, but the events, the pace, the closeness to real life, the innocence of the early years, ... all these things add up to an amazing experience of almost going again through childhood. I am giving it a 9 because, theoretically, there could be better movies out there, although it's gonna be tough to beat this one.

Cosmoeticadotcom The film was nominated for, and won, several awards across the world, but the specter of Bergman still lingers over the film, even if oppositionally. The Swedes depicted on screen are nothing like those in the Bergman universe. They are not rich, depressed, and well educated. Ingemar and his brother and mother live in a shanty house slum, and his uncle's country place is only a little nicer, even if the scenery is much more wholesome. And despite having far more reason to moan than Bergman's characters do, Ingemar is marked by a perseverance one can only refer to as 'dogged.' The cinematography by Jörgen Persson is solid, although there is a repeated static shot of the cosmos, whenever Ingemar gets reflective, that looks like something from a 1950s sci fi film where the word 'Science!' is spoken ecstatically, which should have been made to look a bit more engaging. Granted, this might be the typical textbook sort of photo that a child would associate with outer space in those days, but it still drags on the often deeper narration Ingemar provides, and simply looks cheap.While the film was based upon a novel with the same title, written by Reidar Jonsson, and the screenplay was written by Hallström, Jonsson, and Brasse Brannstrom and Per Berglund, the character of Ingemar succeeds less on the words the character speaks, and mostly on the uncanny acting ability- or even inability, of Glanzelius- who never had another major starring role. There is just something 'off' about little Ingemar, something which, as reflected in the screenplay, is missing in comparison to Glanzelius's portrayal. The text would lead one to believe Ingemar is just another kid, if perhaps one a bit 'off,' yet Glanzelius's unaffected portrayal reveals him to be perhaps 'slow' or borderline 'autistic'- as he might now be labeled, especially when he goes on all fours and barks like a dog or cannot drink from a glass in public without spilling the liquid all over himself. Then there is the actor's very appearance, which has an odd, almost maniacal twinkle in his mien, akin to a young Jack Nicholson's.All in all, My Life As A Dog is a good non-Hollywood Hollywood film, albeit a deeper one, without forced emotions. It is a film that hints at a promise Hallström has yet to fulfill, opening up the query over whether or not it is better to never fill potential by existence and failure or by not existing at all. Perhaps Ingemar already thought that through whilst pondering that dog high above his own canine plight?