Susan Granger’s review of “The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared” (Music Box Films)
Sweden’s highest-grossing film of-all-time revolves around irrepressible, unflappable Allan Karlsson (comedian Robert Gustafsson), who is about to celebrate his 100th birthday when he decides to climb out of the window of the retirement home where he lives and travel around a bit.
Arriving at a nearby transit station, he boards a bus with someone else’s suitcase, not realizing that it belongs to a vicious biker dude (Simon Seppanen) and is stuffed with millions in stolen drug money.
As Allan ambles about, the events of his picaresque life are revealed in surreal flashbacks that show how fanciful misadventures have placed him in the midst of some major historical occasions. It’s an amusing plot device that makes him look like a Scandinavian cousin of “Zelig” or “Forrest Gump.”
Working as an explosives expert, young Allan gets entangled in the Spanish Civil War, the Manhattan Project, and other definitive events of the 20th century, including ludicrous encounters with U.S. Presidents Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, Russia’s Stalin and Gorbachev, and an elephant named Sonya.
Plus there’s his geezer buddy Julius (Iwar Wiklander), their perpetual student/driver Benny (David Wilberg) and Gunilla (Mia Skaringer), the feisty ex-girlfriend of a biker gang member.
Based on Jonas Jonasson’s international best-selling novel of the same name, it’s been inventively adapted by Hans Ingemansson and director Felix Herngren as a black comedy/road movie, as Allan heeds his mother’s wise advice: “You shouldn’t talk too much,” “One thing leads to another,” and “Life is what it is – and what it does.”
And the ungainly length of the title rivals “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain” and “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.”
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared” is an irreverent, slapstick 6, an absurdist comic fable.
