Classic Review: My Life as a Dog (1985)

Is it wrong to have expected something more out of My Life as a Dog? It was a massive international hit, launched Lasse Hallström as a director of sentimental prestige pictures and regularly gets brought up when people talk about foreign films that have achieved mainstream popularity in the English-speaking world. Maybe expectations should have tempered because most cinephiles would point to the film’s success with middlebrow American critics as a drawback. They tend to gravitate towards cheesy, feel good comedy-dramas that trade on cultural stereotypes for fear of alienating ignorant American audience members.

With My Life as a Dog, it does feel like classic Hallström in that it doubles as a saccharine coming of age story and a tourism advert for Sweden. It’s set in a town in rural Småland that feels a bit like the setting for a Hallmark movie. There are cute little cottages, a local glassworks that is full of quirky, unreasonably friendly souls and buxom, cheerful nude models who tolerate the advances of curious young boys. It also happens to be about an eccentric youngster, Ingemar (Glanzelius), who has to learn how to be a man after losing his mother (Lidén). She seems to be suffering from tuberculosis and ships him off to their relatives while she is in the last stages of treatment. Of course, it can’t all be doom and gloom and Ingemar gets to enjoy himself when he stays with his kooky uncle Gunnar (von Brömssen), in the aforementioned small town. It all feels a bit too familiar and a bit too slight. 

Björn Isfält’s relentless attempts to make things sad was particularly irritating. His score was clearly meant to evoke childlike wonderment at the world and a sense of boundless optimism. Unfortunately, he laid everything on a little too thick and the maudlin tone became oppressive. Hallström will pair this unforgivably sentimental music with shots of Ingemar staring out into space and delivering cutesy monologues about dogs and his desire to take care of his mother. These are the moments at which you are meant to get choked up and feel terribly sorry for this little boy. The problem is, we haven’t seen enough of Ingemar’s mother to understand their bond or to view her as more than just an idea. She gets annoyed with her kids, as any mother does, but Hallström always returns to the cliché of her lovingly gazing at her sons when their arguments begin to wind down. Like one of Greta Garbo’s damsels in distress, she exists to be beautiful and tragic and we are never really allowed to see more than her attractive visage. My Life as a Dog would have had far more emotional resonance if we had been allowed to actually see more of her. 

There is also the fact that the film feels too episodic for a story that is meant to trace somebody’s development. It feels like we’re getting brief snapshots of Ingemar’s life during this period but he remains frustratingly inert as time goes on. He faces so many tragedies but his transition into adulthood felt far too smooth. He gets over his mother’s death in an unusually quick fashion and his relationships with young girls are never fleshed out. It never felt like he had developed the integrity and grit that are required to face the world as an adult. One can’t help but wonder what the whole point was, when we don’t really learn anything new about Ingemar over the course of the film. 

While not without its own problems, it’d be hard to overlook some of the funny gags included in the first act of the film. Hallström works wonders as a director when it comes to this sort of daft, low stakes comedy. He has a lightness of touch in these scenes that isn’t present elsewhere. Maybe he should have just turned My Life as a Dog into a light, airy comedy. Packing a whole lot of drama into this simple bildungsroman was the wrong idea. 

still courtesy of STUDIOCANAL

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Zita Short

I am passionate about screwball comedies from the 1930s and certain actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I’ll aim to review new Netflix releases and write features, so expect a lot of romantic comedies and cult favourites.