The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared
Director: Felix Herngren
Cast: Robert Gustafsson, Iwar Wiklander,
David Wiberg, Mia Skaringer, Alan Ford
Rating: (M)
Four stars
Swedish journalist Jonas Jonasson sold his successful media company due to stress, wrote the book he had been thinking about for years, gave it a ridiculously long title and became an internationally best-selling author.
The novel is a shaggy dog story about a man whose love of dynamite put him in the middle of some of the big events of the last century.
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Rialto) is as good a distillation of that novel on to film as you could make.
Swedish comic Robert Gustafsson does a fair job of playing Allan Karlsson from his 20s to 100. When a 100-year-old man leaves his rest-home and finds himself pursued by angry bikers because of a suitcase full of drug money, you would think it was the adventure of a lifetime, but Allan has already lived a life full of incidents and this is just another case where things got out of hand around him.
There have been other movies of holy innocents stumbling their way through history, because it is always a good joke to see the greats of history propped up or undercut by a fool.
Although he is Swedish, Allan managed to wangle himself into the thick of the Cold War, playing the Americans and the Russians off against each other. So, handling thugs who think all they are dealing with is your average very old man almost takes care of itself, leaving Allan plenty of time to reminisce on his very eventful life.
Best thing: How much of the novel remains without compromising the flow of the film.
Worst thing: A lot of the acting verges on the hammy, but that is in keeping with the implausibility of Allan's story.
See it with: A delight in black humour told with sweet whimsy.
- by Christine Powley
