User Reviews

I thought this was a strange movie. It has so many good critiques that I expected something better. It was good at times, but aside that it was downright dull and with mostly unlikeable characters.

Despite being a drama, it isn't as involving and deep as a drama should be. I'd like to sympathize more with the lead character, Ingemar, but I can't always do that. He is hard to evaluate: he isn't annoying, but he ain't sweet peer either. He often seemed like a retard due to his sometimes erratic behavior (such as barking like a dog). Still, he is wonderfully portrayed by the actor Anton Glanzelius.

Saga, the tomboy, was another complicated character. She is supposed to like Ingemar, and yet she shows her love for him in a strange manner: by beating him up in a boxing match and hugging him during or after that. She is well played by Melinda Kinnaman.

This film makes reference to Laika's story a cup of times. Despite his problems, Ingemar often seeks solace by reciting the tragic story of Laika the space dog. That is one good thing about this film, bringing some poetry and some soul to it.

The Swedish film-making and cinematography is another solid point, thanks to the natural beauty of the sunny settings and the characteristic snow and freezy nordic weather.

There have been complains about child nudity. What is it with everybody and this paranoia over pedophilia? Just because of one scene of child nudity in a film they already think it's pedophilia. It's scary how people got paranoid.

I'm not a great lover of subtitled films. The highest credit I can give this, is that within 5 minutes, I'd forgotten that they were even there. You cannot take your eyes of this movie. Beautifully filmed with characters who are so real that at times, you feel like you're intruding. I felt so desperately sad for this young lad who nobody seemed to want. He was clearly deeply affected by his mothers illness and was in desperate need of some kind of counselling. Instead, he was sent to live with a relative in a small town. The people there all seemed wrapped up in their little Worlds To an outsider, they all seemed a bit dysfunctional. Sex rears it head at seemingly every turn. Whether it was the dying man wanting his underwear catalogue read to him, the factory worker admiring his co-workers 'melons', the growth of teenage breasts, the artist sculpting the deeply inappropriate image of a woman and her newborn baby...Well, everyone was at it. Does everyone really think and act like this?..Well, probably more than most people think. I really didn't want this movie to end and actually felt at the conclusion, that I would miss seeing the characters. Don't be put off by the subtitles, you won't notice them!

I first started to watch this movie with my little nephew (thinking because of the title, it was a child's movie). But then the scene took place with the soda bottle, and I quickly turned it off (not to allow my nephew to see it). Later I watched it by myself and loved it greatly! The first time I watched it, it was dubbed, and not as compelling to me as the subtitled version (just watched it).

Throughout the movie, Ingemar, the little boy in the movie, compares the tragic circumstances in his own life to that of other peoples (and a dog), who have much more tragic circumstances, so not to be so sad about his own. This is especially compelling to me, as I do the same thing also!

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?