Foreign kids are so much more hilarious than the precious snowflakes in the U.S. Four minutes into this fantastic Swedish film, Ingemar's older brother is explaining how to make a baby by using an upside down glass bottle to represent what's inside a woman's body and he manages to convince Ingemar to "stick it in." All the kids laugh as they try to free his trapped boyhood from a glass bottleneck. Cut to his long-suffering mother outside, hanging laundry on a line. She asks him why he does such things all the time. He shrugs sheepishly and says "I don't know... I guess it's menopause." They share a knowing grin, and you're hooked.
Soon after, Ingemar is sent away to his uncle's so his chronically sick mother can rest, and though he is sad about leaving his friendly dog and his poor mother behind, the eccentric residents of his Uncle's town help keep his mind off things. He continually reminds himself in voiceover to compare things, because, you know, his life isn't as bad as that of Laika the dog, who was shot into space by the Russians without enough food to survive. He makes similarly darkly comic comparisons throughout the film, and one has to applaud the kiddo for keeping things in perspective during this sad time in his life.
The friends Ingemar makes and oddball adults surrounding him are sweetly strange without lapsing into the sickeningly quirky-for-quirky's-sake territory of the asinine characters in Wes Anderson films (Thank God). Ingemar himself is acted with a deft naturalism that you could swear this was documentary footage of a boy's life. The benign pastoral mischief he gets into has a timelessness that makes one forget the action is set in the late 1950s and allows the movie to float in the viewer's memory of its charming sentiment without sentimentality. It's fun and funny and profound and a pure delight. You'll be happy to have seen it if you get the chance.