My Life as a Dog explores death and sexuality

Young Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius ) covers his ears and sings to block out the excruciating sobs and screams of his emotionally unstable mother who is dying. In another scene, his brother severely cuts his groin with a glass bottle in a malicious demonstration of how babies are made. The disturbing nature of these scenes illustrates the turbulence of Ingemar's coming of age in Lasse Hallstrom's film My Life As a Dog.

Ingemar must learn to cope with his mother's imminent death at the same time he discovers his sexuality. This process inevitably inflicts deep emotional wounds, which, as in the case of the glass bottle, are at several points brought home to the viewer through physical violence. When Ingemar's close friend and potential first love tells him that his dog is dead, a statement that seems to bring home his mother's death, she adds injury to insult. At the time, the two are boxing each other in a makeshift ring on top of a haystack. She pummels Ingemar, and he falls a good fifty feet through the weak ropes.

The viewer is concerned about his physical well-being for a couple of seconds before he manages to get up. The shock of the fall and the uncertainty of the condition of our protagonist add to the emotional impact of the scene, and make it understandable when we subsequently see him in a state of trauma.

In another scene, Ingemar's sexual coming of age coincides with physical harm. He is staring through a glass roof at a female nude model, when he falls through the ceiling and gets shards stuck inside of him. Because he does not suffer any serious injuries, the scene is more comical than anything else, but it still reinforces the painful nature of his development.

Throuought the film, there is a stable theme that when Ingemar's emotional wounds heal, he emerges a stronger boy, well on his way toward manhood. In order for this to happen, however, the wounds must be treated with love, or else become infected to leave him scarred. Ingemar's home life with his mother and brother is the setting where he receives most of his wounds. When his mother cannot take care of him anymore, he goes to live with his uncle and aunt in an idyllic village. This is where, with time and love, he has the opportunity to heal, and just as importantly, to learn from his wounds.

As most of the film takes place in his uncle and aunt's village, there are as many tender and funny moments as there are disturbing ones. Many of these are not there merely for feel-good effect, as they correspond to the themes of sexuality and death pervasive throughout the movie. For example, a dying old man asks Ingemar to read to him the lingerie ads in a dirty magazine. The town daredevil performs several endearing stunts in which he risks death but emerges unscathed.

The fact that My Life As a Dog avoids gratuitous scenes, either of violence or good sentiment, shows that it is a well-constructed film, but this construction is as interesting for what it does do as for what it avoids. The action is interspersed with a recurring flashback of Ingemar with his mother which provides the first shot of the film, before the opening credits. The flashback coincides with Ingemar's voice, which repeatedly offers anecdotes about how it is important to keep his situation in perspective, and how it could have been worse. He offers accounts of tragedy after tragedy, which are puzzling at first, but increasingly evoke the absurdity of death as they are repeated throughout the course of the film. By the end they have accumulated power, and only at the conclusion do they make sense within the action of the film.

My Life As a Dog has many things going for it. It was produced by Svensk Filmindustri, the same company which produced many of Ingmar Bergman's great films; and it is in Swedish, a beautiful and melodious language. More importantly, it is an original, well-constructed portrayal of the coming of age of a boy who has to come to terms with death and his sexuality.