My Life as a Dog: It's All About Perspective

So now we're watching My Life as a Dog (or "Mitt liv som hund", if you're of the Swedish persuasion), a coming-of-age tale about a young boy who lives with his uncle for a summer to give his terminally ill mother some peace and quiet.  Released in 1985, this film was nominated for two Oscars and makes it onto our list at #464.

Ingemar and his brother are a handful.  So their mother, who is terminally ill (presumably with tuberculosis), makes the decision to ship them off for the summer so that she can have some time to rest.  Erik (the brother) is sent to stay with his grandmother, while Ingemar goes off to his uncle's house.

He has a pretty good summer, all things considered.  He develops relationships with the people who live in his uncle's town, and establishes a close friendship with Saga, a girl masquerading as a boy so that she can play soccer.  Ingemar spends his days playing with his friends, learning how to box, and spying on naked women (oh, 12 year olds).  But every summer must end, and Ingemar goes home to reality and his dying mother.

When he returns home, he finds her condition much worse, and it isn't long before she has to be taken to a hospital (sanitarium?).  Just before Christmas, she dies.  And so Ingemar is sent back to live with his uncle.  But they have taken in a family of Greek boarders, and there really isn't room for him...so the little boy is foisted onto an old lady whose husband recently died.  Ingemar asks that his uncle send for Sickan, the dog he had with living with his mother, who had been living in a kennel for several months.  He eventually discovers that the dog has died, and he feels truly alone.  Still, he reminds himself that other people have it much worse, and thinks of Laika, the dog that was sent into space aboard Sputnik and starved to death.  It's all about perspective.

But all of these things become too much for him to cope with objectively, and he has to deal with his emotions, which finally allow him to move on.


Random Musings:

• Movie, why must you upset me in the first minute and a half?  I cried when, as a child, I first heard the story of the dog they sent up into space with no way of bringing her back down, but I had managed to block it out of my mind...until now.

• Yeah, kid, cut your thumb open with a rusty knife for no good reason.  That's smart.  Sweetie, I don't know who you've been talking to, but making your girlfriend drink your blood doesn't mean you're married.  It means you're vampires.

• Oh my God this poor little boy!  Seriously dude, I think everyone understood the concept of conception without you making your twelve year old brother stick his junk in a beer bottle.  Sick Swedish bastard.

• Seriously, the older brother is pretty much the devil.  Who wakes up their little brother by firing a fake (but loud) gun at their head?  No wonder the poor kid wet himself.

• The mom seems a little extreme, but I guess I can see where she's coming from.  She's really sick, and those boys just seem to make all this extra work for her.

• Seriously, kid?  How did you manage to single handedly start a freaking wildfire?!  At least the dog made it...I thought for a second she was going to die in the fire, and so far she's my favorite character.  I don't know if I trust this kennel...something tells me this is the kind of movie where the dog gets it to show that Life Isn't Fair and Sometimes Innocent Animals Die Horrible Deaths.

• Is this creepy old man seriously having Ingemar read him bra ads?  That's all kinds of weird.

• Umm...maybe riding a unicycle isn't the best thing to be doing while there's tons of men carrying around flaming hot pieces of glass.  Just saying.

• By the way, where the uncle works...is this an IKEA factory?  Because that would be cool.

• I am so intrigued by this androgynous little girl.  What a great, interesting character.

• And I am officially jealous that they have a fake spaceship rigged up to play in.  If I had one of those, I would be in it right now.

• I don't want to come off as Judge-y McJudgerson, but if I was terminally ill, I think I would want to spend some time with my kids, not send them away.  Unless she's worried that they would catch her tuberculosis (that would make sense, but the way they presented it made it seem like the boys were just annoying and she didn't want to deal with them.)

• Holy crap, Ingemar!  You just fell through a skylight trying to see a naked woman.  That's what you just did.  Sweetie, they have magazines for that sort of thing.  There's no reason to throw yourself through a window!

• I'm having a hard time with this mother.  You just sent your kids away for the whole summer, your little boy is trying to tell you a story, and you interrupt him to ask if you can read a book instead of listening to him?  Nice.  Great parenting.

• OMG can we please stop talking about the dog that starved in Sputnik?  Please?

• And who is this little blonde bitch who tells Ingemar that it was good for their mother to have time away from the boys?  Who the hell are you?  And who says that to a little boy!?!