It's hard to say for sure. I suspect not. We had French teachers who would put on French movies in class, though not the French New Wave or anything like that. (Not usually. I have some memory of watching Godard's Breathless in school, though I would have been older.) Specifically, I remember a movie called La Boum (The Party) being shown in school, enough that it's in my big movie list.
My Life as a Dog, though, was certainly the first time I chose to see a movie made in another country in the theater, with my own money, or at least with my parents' money.
Hallstrom's film has a 1985 release date in Sweden, but IMDB shows me it didn't come out in the U.S. until May of 1987, which makes sense with the timeline I remember. That summer was when I transitioned from middle school to high school, so I would have been 13 about to turn 14. We had a friend who led the way in transitioning from childish things to not so childish things -- I may have still been playing with G.I. Joes at that age -- and that summer he convinced a bunch of us that this movie was great and we needed to see it. So we did.
And thought it was great.
I was not, until then, even aware of a desire to become more sophisticated in my tastes, so something like My Life as a Dog was a good gateway to foreign language films. It features a lead character who would have been a couple years younger than we were, but close enough in age for his coming of age to seem relevant to us. Anton Glanzelius, who plays Ingemar, is a year younger than us, but the actress playing his rival-slash-love interest, the tomboy Saga, Melinda Kinnaman, is two years older, I now see. Because she's dressed as a boy for most of the movie, I don't feel like I felt any independent romantic stirrings for the actress, though my sophisticated friend clearly did, as I remember him going on about it. Which, in retrospect, was a bit strange, because she looked a bit like his sister.
However, the whole experience -- watching a foreign film, ingratiating myself to our cool friend, taking a further step toward adulthood, knowing there was supposed to be something intoxicating and romantic about Melinda Kinnaman (she shows her mosquito bite breasts on two occasions, which now seems strange for an actress who as only 14 during filming) -- left me feeling that this was a masterpiece. It helped that the film had a highly contemplative nature I remember most, specifically, Ingemar's pondering of the plight of Laika the dog, sent into space by the Russians where she was left to die when she ran out of food. These thoughts were set against a backdrop of the stars, just adding further dimension to this experience I was having. Then there's the underlying narrative element that Ingemar is sent to the country to live with his aunt and uncle because his mother is dying, which must have had added poignancy for us.
My lingering impression of My Life as a Dog has stood untested until now. Over the years, I have considered a rewatch, and especially within the past ten, have multiple times looked for it on a service like iTunes, never with any success. As I was reviewing my highly ranked films for a post that will probably go up tomorrow, I had occasion to look it up again -- and there it was, finally, on iTunes, available for a $3.99 rental. So on Sunday night, I watched it.
Just to give you an idea how elevated this has been in my mind, I should tell you how elevated it is in my Flickchart. It's currently my 150th ranked movie, and I don't have to tell you the type of masterpieces that puts it ahead of. But for context, my next five are Boyhood, Zootopia, Rain Man, Trainspotting and Coco. #150 means it's higher than all but a half-dozen movies I've named #1 for a year since I started doing that in 1996. (Parasite is only one ahead, and then the others that outrank Dog are A Separation, Moon, Titanic, There Will Be Blood, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lost in Translation, Adaptation and Children of Men.) In other words, I love it -- or think I do.
Well, My Life as a Dog does not deserve to round out my top 150. It still deserves a place in my top 500, but that's as far as I'm willing to go.
It was interesting to watch the film unfold and like what it was doing at every step of the way, but generally fail to find what it was doing distinctive -- at least in comparison to my considerably better established film knowledge 40 years later. I'm wondering, in retrospect, if this was also among the first coming-of-age movies I saw. I would of course have seen movies featuring kids and high schoolers before -- two of my favorites at that age would have been The Goonies and Back to the Future -- but it's hard to call those first and foremost coming-of-age films. Stand by Me was before this, but there were no girls. My Life as a Dog is like the prototypical coming-of-age story, as its main character is bridging that period of his life where we still see him wet the bed, and where he sneaks a peak at a Britt Ekland/Anita Ekberg type in the village, posing nude for a sculpture. There's also, of course, the moment when Saga shows him her mosquito bites, and wants him to show her his "thing."
I don't remember feeling particularly titillated by any of it, maybe not even the Ekland/Ekberg type (actually actress Anki Liden) posing nude. However, I do remember feeling that there was supposed to be something special about the Ingemar-Saga relationship, but I'm wondering if that's just because my friend was such a big fan of her, and it created in me a sense of anticipation toward the girls my age that were actually in my own life. I was definitely already into them by that age, as I remember the drama of who and whether I was going to ask them to dance at the middle school dance.
There's some good quirk in the Swedish countryside village where Ingemar plays a little soccer, does a little boxing (almost exclusively against Saga), works on a summerhouse with his eccentric uncle, and gets stranded in a zipwire lunar module that only makes it halfway across its intended length. There's a repeated bit about how his uncle insists on playing the same goofy song over and over again on his record player, which drives his wife, Ingemar's aunt, to the brink of barking mad.
Speaking of barking ... yes that's a thing, and why the movie is called what it is. On a couple occasions, Ingemar pretends he's a dog, which ties into the canine themes of Laika the space dog and Ingemar's own dog, who was taken to a kennel "temporarily" (but has actually been put down). It threads the themes through well enough, but I did not find it astonishing in its own right.
So yeah ... maybe we shouldn't revisit these formative films if we want to still think of them in the same light. However, I've also always said that any film you love should be able to stand up to the scrutiny of a rewatch, and I feel it's appropriate to know that My Life as a Dog should steadily lose duels on Flickchart to films I like better.
Even though the film didn't have the profound impact that it had on me when I was 13, one thing I will never lose is that feeling of graduating from movies intended only for children to those that seemed more adult in their goals ... even though they also starred children. I remember very clearly the sense of feeling proud of myself for loving My Life as a Dog as much as I did, for not feeling it was homework, something I had to read, something that would be shown to us in school. Choosing something like My Life as a Dog for myself, even if I never would have seen it or even heard of it without the urgings of a friend, was part of my own coming-of-age story.
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