Allan is wizened and slack-jawed, but his mind clicks and his body still obeys, albeit slowly. He’s about to turn 100 at a retirement home staffed by dim nurses’ aides and wants no part of it. Clambering onto the ledge of his room, Allan jumps—two feet down to the lawn. Death will visit soon enough; meanwhile, he wants one last chance to live. Padding to a nearby bus station, he pulls enough change from his pocket to purchase a one-way ticket to a nearby town so small that it barely exists.
Like Federico Fellini by way of Emir Kusturica, the Swedish film The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared is a darkly hilarious, absurdist fable about our times and times gone by. Allan’s life spans a century of agony and its whimpering aftermath. Along the way, he encounters Francisco Franco, Josef Stalin, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev along with an uncommitted Gen Xer (he’s been in college for 18 years without earning a degree) and an animal rights activist with a pet elephant. History may have famously ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but Allan (Robert Gustafsson) wonders why the crowd tore it down by hand when dynamite would have done the job more efficiently. Unlike his fictional American cousin, Forest Gump, destruction is integral to Allan’s character. He spent his life blowing things up.
Working from the bestselling novel by Jonas Jonasson, director Felix Herngren flips between past and present, between Allan’s unanticipated centennial adventure and a chronicle of the preceding century. Encountering a rude skinhead at the bus station, Allan toddles onto the bus with the young man’s suitcase, which, it transpires, is stuffed with cash. The skinhead tracks him to the home of Julius, a retiree who invites the lost-looking Allan to dinner. As the skinhead beats Julius mercilessly, the resourceful Allan soft-shoes from behind and strikes the assailant on the head with a mallet. As in all the wars he has witnessed, one death leads to another—in this case, the skinhead’s gang, prodded by a British crime lord, mobilize to find the money.
The unusual twists of Allan’s life begin with his father’s arrest for advocating birth control and revolution. Dad goes to Russia, expecting a hearty Bolshevik welcome. They drag him to a firing squad instead. Allan’s mother dies, telling him, “Your father was always thinking for no good reason.” Ideology is bunk. Better to blow things up, starting with the local merchant who cheated his mother. When he accompanies a motor-mouthed agitator to fight with Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, his slogan-shouting friend is first to die. Allan keeps his head down and blows things up.
Misunderstanding is the film’s pervasive theme. Allan encounters a congenial Franco, who mistakenly believes that the Swede saved his life from an explosion. Allan emigrates to America, where, as an orderly in the Manhattan Project, he clears up Oppenheimer’s misconceptions about detonators and enables the biggest explosion ever. Mistaking him for a brilliant physicist, Soviet agents kidnap him and bring him before a drunken Stalin, who takes him for a fascist because of his Franco story. As the Cold War continues, Allan becomes a double agent, feeding useless information to the CIA and the KGB. He finds no value in reflection. “Life is what it is and it does what it does,” he says.
The hilarity has a sharp after bite, yet Allan manages to be a sympathetic Everyman as he half blunders, half sagely steps through the minefield of politics and crime. “Regret doesn’t do much good,” he observes, “unless you own a time machine.”
Opens Friday, June 26, Downer Theatre.
The 100-Year-Old Man who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared
3 and a half stars
Robert Gustafsson
Directed by Felix Herngren
Rated R
