Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Hollywood has been importing talented European filmmakers at least since the early ‘20s, when Victor Sjostrom and Ernst Lubitsch heeded the siren wail of Tinseltown resources. As with those August old-schoolers, and subsequent émigrés from Douglas Sirk to Roman Polanski to John Woo, the Industry work quickly overshadows the cultural memory of the films that got them initially noticed. So it is with Lasse Hallström, whose big-budget, Oscar-prone American films—symptomatically, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat, and The Shipping News—have come to loom in renown over his original worldwide profile-maker My Life as a Dog (1987), which remains one of the greatest of all films about children.

Hallström’s oeuvre has unmistakable themes—the passage of the innocent outsider through an alien social landscape, and, contrastingly, the power of human idiosyncrasy in those societies. In effect, it’s a perspective generous to everything it surveys, and My Life is the most generous film Hallström has ever made. At the same time, it’s far from sentimental, exploring—as all memorable movies about childhood do—the contentious struggle to understand or at least withstand the bulldozing machinations of the adult world. (Hallström’s movie rounds out a brief list that includes Zero de Conduite, Curse of the Cat People, The 400 Blows, Empire of the Sun, Ponette, and Ratcatcher.) There are few subjects as universal and resonant in movies as this heartbreaking dynamic, because the primary issues that so cruelly devastate childhood’s pure hopefulness are the classic bugbears of human culture: sex and death. In My Life as a Dog, these twin dynamos of Blakean “experience” shake the world of school-grader Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius), tearing at his modest life’s fabric like hurricane winds. With his consumptive mother rapidly approaching her deathbed, Ingemar is shunted aside (resulting in one stress-magnifying disaster after another, as the elfin, tic-ridden boy attempts to make sense of his daily existence), and eventually displaced altogether, to his uncle’s semi-rural factory burg, where everybody and everything seem focused on the urges, suppressions, and buddings of sexual cognizance.

Fueled by loss and irrational desire, this semi-industrial community is a naturally disorienting realm. Ingemar himself is a hopelessly tragic figure, particularly for viewers with children, for whom My Life as a Dog can be a tribulation. The depiction of a child’s psychology—Ingemar narrates throughout about maintaining “a certain distance” from his troubles, by contemplating fortunes worse than his, like the fate of a Russian space-program dog who was left to starve in orbit—is wise and subtly applied. (The metaphoric association with dogs—who are also helplessly subject to the heartless whims of grown-ups—is sobering.) Ingemar emerges a fully 3-D child, for whom events can be monumentally terrible, utterly confusing, and hilarious all at once; there is no predicting how he will react to his experiences. Glanzelius, as Hallström directed him, is a behavioral miracle—you see his good intentions, denial, bizarre ideas, dogged efforts at reasoning out life, and impulses toward anarchic payback all bounce off each other like lottery ping-pong balls, and eventually take control of his actions.

In contrast to typical Hollywood films, the movie contemplates character, behavior, and experience for their own sakes, not in the service of “arc” or narrative revelation or simplistic heroism. Thus, the community in which Ingemar finds himself as his mother fades and 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, the unpredictable working-class inhabitants are also acrobats, daffy inventors, soccer players, woodworkers, nude models, and ice swimmers. But Hallström never dwells on eccentricity—these lives and this place are only fragmentally 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.

However the town’s comic texture might suggest the patronizing small-town wackiness of Fellini’s Amarcord in outline (indeed, My Life has been responsible for scads of international, quirky-pageant-of-life imitators), Hallström’s movie isn’t a feel-good endorphin flood. The suffering is palpable; at home, Ingemar is an accident that never stops happening, and his miserable mother does little but scream, groan, and disappear into books. Ingemar may idealize her in his memory, but Hallström doesn’t, and this is vital to the film’s power: the mother is so overwhelmed by her disease and imminent death that she’s lost the capacity to sacrifice her feelings for her child’s sake. The boy’s eventual sobbing cry into his pillow, “Why did you not want me, Mama?” is a brutal question the film doesn’t try to answer—unless the simple, demonstrated knowledge of human ambiguity under pressure is answer enough.

Still, My Life as a Dog is a stubbornly affectionate and often lyrical film. Hallström backdrops Ingemar’s narrational asides about the misery of others with a vision of a star-filled night sky as a child might see it lying on his or her back, imagining the plight of that Russian dog. The film’s visual sense is organically realist: whole scenes are often swallowed in one shot, seen from a slight distance, so the characters and the environment can be experienced without manipulation. Simple, patient images like Ingemar huddled on a bench in a wide hospital hall after having visited his mother’s sick room have an impact no amount of hyperactive editing and emphatic mega-close-ups, in the American style, can approximate. When the child returns to his uncle’s town after finally being orphaned, we can barely see him disembark the train for all of the steam and snow, until his lovable, irreverent uncle runs to meet him, picks him up and stands embracing him selflessly in the cold. It’s a film about people shaped by people, by the rhythms of their behavior and feelings, and in this My Life as a Dog belongs to a tradition beginning with Jean Renoir, a sensibility that has been explored precious little since and may very well be expiring. What could be more fundamental as a cinematic substance than the truly observed properties of our fellow humans?

Categories: Film Essays