Co-written and directed by Felix Herngren, The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is a strange one for sure! Some of the narrative may have been lost in translation (this is a Swedish import), but I was definitely able to grasp the busy plot and dizzying array of characters, places, and things. Allan Karlsson, played by Robert Gustafsson who is a massive star in Sweden, is a 100-year-old explosives expert, tired of being cooped up in his boring retirement home. So, on his 100th birthday, he just splits – he jumps out the window, shambles over to the bus station, inadvertently absconds with a gangster’s cash-filled suitcase, and then boards a bus for a small town where everyone and everything that he meets or touches gets messed up in one way or another. This is a bizarre movie, filled with sudden bits of graphic violence, playful comedy, moments of Jean-Pierre Jeunet whimsy and color saturation, and a sense of madcap in the final reel with lots of set pieces and outlandish happenings. Brick-Top from Snatch shows up as a head gangster who wants his suitcase back, all of the supporting performances are colorful and absurd, but the star of the show is Gustafsson as old-fogey Karlsson, whose life story is doled out in flashback, and resembles something out of Forrest Gump, in the sense that the narrative places him front and center during key bits of world history (Franco, Stalin, the Manhattan project, the construction of the Empire State building, and so much more) and the audience watches as he comically navigates his way through all of the madness. Again, this is a busy, sometimes frenetic movie, with an odd fixation on people getting blown up and lots of sequences of people getting shit-faces, and I definitely responded to the dark, ironic humor that filled the edges of the unique screenplay. I’ll leave you to discover how and why an elephant is required to get this story from A-to-B-to-C…!
Podcasting Them Softly 