Sun
16-Oct-2005

my life as a dog

After we'd got back home from the party, Matt, Phil and I watched the Lasse Hallström film, My Life As A Dog. This was very good - a coming of age film about a boy called Ingemar, who lives in 1950s Sweden with his older brother and his dying, self-obsessed mother. The two children are dispatched to stay with various relatives, as their mother grows more and more unstable. Ingemar's beloved pet dog, Sickan, who he loves as much as his mother, is put down. He ends up staying with his uncle in a semi rural town dominated by a big glass making factory.

The film makes no attempt to mask the complexity of Ingemar's experiences - he is often sad, confused and scared all at once, and liable to react in all kinds of ways. There is a real sense of his precarious development, as the traumatic events that beset him threaten to mentally unhinge him. There is a quite scary section where he forsakes human speech and starts to act and bark like a dog in reaction to the confusion of the world around him. By the end of the film, he seems to have navigated these rocky waters intact however.

His uncle's town is beautifully portrayed as well - it comes across as a real place, full of deep complexities and unfinished stories of its own, more than just a backdrop to Ingemar's tale. Thus there is a mostly unexplained story line about a nude model who poses for the local, lustful artist and who takes Ingemar along with her to make sure that the artist behaves. There is a batty old man who works in the glass making factory who occasionly comes up with some random feat that brings the whole town running to watch, such as tightrope cycling while juggling, or swimming in the icy lake in the middle of winter.

The film is warm and moving, without veering into sentimentality, which is quite a feat when you consider what it is about. Well worth a watch.

matt, jamie and daniel's birthday party

Last night was the joint birthday party madness down at Jamie's flat in Putney. We all got rather trashed, and it was a great night. Not as crowded as last year's, and just right. Josh H turned up, the only Oxford person, and we spent lots of time catching up, which was nice. He also bonded with Aaron over being from Essex, and leafed through that classic gay publication - Vulcan magazine. We met Wesley's new beau, Mark, and Daniel's long distance lover, Charlie. Juicy ran around introducing everyone to everyone else, which was certainly a very useful service for those who didn't know everyone else. The Poles were there in force, and quite fucked even before I arrived. We finally passed out in the early morning light, catching a few hours sleep on the living room floor before rising to do some cleaning.

Juicy has some pictures on his blog.