Of this week's two foreign comedies about elderly crime sprees, Felix Herngren's very funny The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared wins by a long shot, even if it does begin with the death of a cat, which is always tricky. The 100-year-old man in question is the simpleminded Allan (Robert Gustafsson), exiled to a nursing after getting revenge on the fox that killed his cat. Allan's subsequent escape leads to a cross-country chase involving the police, a motorcycle gang after a suitcase full of cash, and an elephant. (Unlike the Proboscidea-free Hunting Elephants, there's actually an elephant in this movie!) Meanwhile, Allan flashes back to key moments from his century of living, an odd life that involved frequently blowing things up for a living while rubbing shoulders with historical figures like Generalissimo Francisco Franco (Kolda Losada), Robert Oppenheimer (Philip Rosch), and Harry S. Truman (Kerry Shale). Comparisons to Forrest Gump are inevitable, but unlike that film's unpleasantly conservative morality, The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is gleefully amoral, never more so than when ruminating on how families are formed. And if you listen closely, you can hear Private Wilhelm getting shot in the Gulag flashback.
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