The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of A Window And Disappeared (15.)
Directed by Felix Herngen.
Starring Robert Gustafsson, Iwar Wiklander, David Wiberg, Mia Skaringer and Alan Ford. Swedish with subtitles. 117 mins
Allan Karlsson is our little big man: a hard drinking dullard obsessed with dynamite, who bobs randomly through the 20th Century, disinterestedly accumulating wild and improbable adventures. Incredible and implausible coincidences are drawn to him. In the present, he pops out of the window at his care home on the day of his 100th birthday and almost immediately finds himself embroiled in a romp involving drug dealing biker gangs, a suitcase full of money and a former circus elepant. In parallel we see his life story which sees him cross paths with, and inadvertently influence, figures such as Stalin, Franco, Reagan and Swedish eugenicists.
It has a good title, but the title has some drawbacks. Firstly it strongly intimates that this adaptation of the hit novel by Jonas Jonasson, is going be wacky. Secondly, having made a big deal of it, it means that they have to come up with a lead performer who is convincingly 100 and even beneath a layer of prosthetic, Robert Gustafsson neither looks nor moves like a centenarion. I'd say 87 tops, and that's being generous. But then nothing really convinces in this film: the actors playing famous people don't resemble them and the script offers zany contrivance rather than insight.
Such picaresque narratives are common in literature but in the cinema they seem to immediately invite comparison with Forrest Gump and 100 year-old-man, at least the film version, seems to be conceived as an anti-Gump. Though Karlsson is equally simpleminded, he is far from innocent. He is casually oblivious to the suffering of others, even when it is responsible for it. While Gump largely meets up with a wide range of public figures, Karlsson hob nobs only with dictators.
The message seems much the same though. He lives by his mother's dying words “life is what it is.” Both films see history as being one damn thing after another, with everything steered not by ideology but by dumb luck. In Gump there was a dark poignancy in seeing this well-intention idiot live a charmed life while everybody else's great idealistic dreams come crashing down; in this film Karlsson's luck is just a flippant, nihilistic joke. He is more nobody than everyman; frankly you wonder whatever drew all these wild, improbable coincidences to him.
Directed by Felix Herngen.
Starring Robert Gustafsson, Iwar Wiklander, David Wiberg, Mia Skaringer and Alan Ford. Swedish with subtitles. 117 mins
Allan Karlsson is our little big man: a hard drinking dullard obsessed with dynamite, who bobs randomly through the 20th Century, disinterestedly accumulating wild and improbable adventures. Incredible and implausible coincidences are drawn to him. In the present, he pops out of the window at his care home on the day of his 100th birthday and almost immediately finds himself embroiled in a romp involving drug dealing biker gangs, a suitcase full of money and a former circus elepant. In parallel we see his life story which sees him cross paths with, and inadvertently influence, figures such as Stalin, Franco, Reagan and Swedish eugenicists.
It has a good title, but the title has some drawbacks. Firstly it strongly intimates that this adaptation of the hit novel by Jonas Jonasson, is going be wacky. Secondly, having made a big deal of it, it means that they have to come up with a lead performer who is convincingly 100 and even beneath a layer of prosthetic, Robert Gustafsson neither looks nor moves like a centenarion. I'd say 87 tops, and that's being generous. But then nothing really convinces in this film: the actors playing famous people don't resemble them and the script offers zany contrivance rather than insight.
Such picaresque narratives are common in literature but in the cinema they seem to immediately invite comparison with Forrest Gump and 100 year-old-man, at least the film version, seems to be conceived as an anti-Gump. Though Karlsson is equally simpleminded, he is far from innocent. He is casually oblivious to the suffering of others, even when it is responsible for it. While Gump largely meets up with a wide range of public figures, Karlsson hob nobs only with dictators.
The message seems much the same though. He lives by his mother's dying words “life is what it is.” Both films see history as being one damn thing after another, with everything steered not by ideology but by dumb luck. In Gump there was a dark poignancy in seeing this well-intention idiot live a charmed life while everybody else's great idealistic dreams come crashing down; in this film Karlsson's luck is just a flippant, nihilistic joke. He is more nobody than everyman; frankly you wonder whatever drew all these wild, improbable coincidences to him.
