Léolo

Plot synopsis:
In Mile End, Montreal, Léo Lauzon is a young boy living in a tenement with his dysfunctional family, who serves as the unreliable narrator. He uses his active fantasy life and the book L'avalée des avalés by Québécois novelist Réjean Ducharme to escape the reality of his life. He feels his father is insane and denies being his son. After having a dream revealing his mother was impregnated after falling into a cart of tomatoes contaminated by an Italian man's semen, Léo identifies as Italian rather than French Canadian and adopts the name Léolo Lozone.
Léolo observes a neighbouring young woman named Bianca and imagines her singing to him from a closet, emitting a white light. His grandfather, who Léolo believes attempted to murder him by holding him under a pool, helps her financially and extorts her for sexual favours, revealing her breasts and putting his feet in her mouth. Léolo begins to fantasize about Bianca sexually and discovers masturbation. His brother Fernand, after being beaten by a bully and failed in a special education class, builds up impressive muscles. However, upon being confronted by the bully for a second time, Fernand is overwhelmed with fear and is beaten again while Léolo watches in shock. Finally convinced his grandfather is responsible for all of the family's troubles, Léolo attempts to lower a noose and hang his grandfather while he is in the bath. His grandfather sees Léolo doing it and is choked, before finally being freed, with Léolo injured in the process. Léolo subsequently goes to the hospital, where he is told his actions could constitute attempted murder. He is not charged, but upon later becoming ill, ends up in the same institution where many other members of his family have been treated at.

Tags: insanity, psychedelic, dark

Review:
This was only director Jean-Claude Lauzon's second film, and sadly he never got to make more than two; he died in a plane crash while he was preparing his third film.A beautiful, unforgettable work of art, albeit not one for the easily offended.My vote: 10 out of 10Favorite films: http://www.IMDb.com/list/mkjOKvqlSBs/Lesser-known Masterpieces: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls070242495/Favorite Low-Budget and B-movies: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls054808375/Favorite TV-Shows reviewed: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls075552387/.
Why was this movie made?A boy is coming of age in a totally dysfunctional family.
And what an inspiring thing it is to see a young boy having sex with a cat.I felt like taking a shower after watching this movie.
The boy, Léolo, finds his family so difficult to deal with that he escapes into dreams, fantasy, and writing.
There is a mixture of things like Tom Waits' "Cold Cold Ground," Tallis' "Spem in Allum," the Stones' "You can't always get what you want," and chanting.Much of the movie is told in a voice-over and sections of the novel "L'avalée des avallés" by the Canadian Réjean DuCharme are read - this is a book that Léolo is reading and it is the only book in his house.
A recurring quote is, "Because I dream, I'm not." I think the idea behind that is that we dream to escape reality, but your guess is as good as mine.I have to give this movie credit for coming out of nowhere to give us something like we have never seen before, but that doesn't mean that we will like it.
A beauty I feel was intentionally and successfully accented by the sordid scenarios stitched together.It would be an interesting test for someone to read the poetry from the screenplay first and then watch the film.
Would the words be strong enough without the sights, sounds and implied smells of Leolo's world to suffice?While I cannot honestly recommend this film (too many times I found myself hoping that a fade-to-black was final), it would be interesting to hear/read others' comments.
I caught this late one night on the Independent film channel i caught the first few minutes and was amazed when i had finally seen the whole thing I loved it rarely have i seen a more poetic or brilliantly told portrait of any person young or old personified on screen the film is French-Canadian but transcends language Maxime Collin's performance is stellar.
Echoes of the magnificent THE TIN DRUM reverberate through the stunning, lyrical French-Canadian LEOLO.The late Jean-Claud Lauzon's masterwork filters a dysfunctional family through the eyes of a dreamer who imagines himself to be Italian.The film is filled with gorgeous cinematic studies of childhood cruelty, sexual abuse, eccentricity, first love, first self-love, insanity, obsession, unusual uses for meat products, and familial bonds.As Leolo, Maxime Collin is without peer, delivering a truly amazing performance as a young boy on a difficult journey of discovery and exploration.A wonderful Tom Waits cue anchors the soundtrack and eccentric supporting performances bring vivid color to the drama.The film is photographed and directed with such amazing precision and passion that you can not help but be propelled by it.In every sense an original, emotional work, and one of the best films ever made.An obscure modern classic..
Sometimes it had me laughing (like in the beginning with the tomato, later when Leolo trades his flies for his sister's turd, etc); And then sometimes I was totally grossed out (like the cat scene).
There's definitely some "toilet" humour throughout this film.Almost always I watch movies for enjoyment and I try not to analyse too much because it often spoils my enjoyment.
(Maybe I'm the ignorant savage in the art museum.).I wouldn't really class this movie as a comedy although it has some humorous scenes (very dark humour).
I got rid of it for that reason: overall - just too sick and too strange.It gets ugly because a 12-year-old kid, whom the story is centered around, starts to lose it.
People think Hollywood is morally bankrupt....well, the rest of the world, especially in the film-making business, is worse and this is a prime example..
(In this respect in reminds me a bit of Milan Kundera's novels, during the reading of which I often find myself embarrassed for the characters that I am there intruding on their privacy.) I think what myself and my friends (then still young adults) feared was revealing something about ourselves--a kind of fragility and ambivalence in one's own self-relation that one normally represses, but which this film repeatedly draws to the surface.
The first time I watched it, in a movie theater, I just sat there after the film had ended, emotionally exhausted.
'I loved Fernand for his ignorance...because I dream I am not' I watched Leolo again on IFC few nights ago (after what is now more then ten years when I first saw it in a theater) and realized that this film was one of the catalysts for my entrance into the world of cinema.
I saw GUMMO before LEOLO, which is why I'm calling this review GUMMO part 0.And I have to say that what struck me first while watching LEOLO is the similarities between both films: a kid surrounded by crazy people.
The end result of the movie is like a narcissistic mobius strip: kid writing journal in his youth.
Just like GUMMO.LEOLO and GUMMO would make a great double feature for masochists of phony cinema.If you want to see a great Canadian movie about a kid and her dysfunctional family, watch LES BONS DEBARRAS instead.
Leolo spends his spare time reading and writing, but when he tries to interact with children his own age, he realizes how little he has in common with them.
Leolo still tries to overcome the horror of his life, but the family curse is something he can't evade.What's more saddening than the conclusion to this film, is the tragic death of the films director Jean-Claude Lauzon.
The tragic accident that claimed his life seems so ironic when considering Leolo's tragic end.I loved everything about this film, especially the soundtrack.
According to the IMDb, the actor who played Leolo, Maxime Collin, was about 12 years old at the time of the filming.
We can say that they are "just acting", but the reason pedophile behavior is wrong is because children are too young to know what is going on and in no position to say no to an adult.This movie reflects a film industry that encourages perverted and morally-reprehensible films, and an audience that just doesn't seem to care.
I shut the movie off, saving myself the torment of watching what someone told me was in the 2nd half: more masturbation, sex with animals, more people taking dumps, sex with 12-year-old-boys, and probably a few farts for good measure.American Pie 2.I'm sorry to say that this is the first Canadian movie I've seen that royally bit the big one.
Sadly, Lauzon died in a plane crash shortly after Leolo's release, but he left us with a film that has more heart, life and originality than 50 Hollywood films put together.
A film like this reminds us of everything that is wrong with Hollywood, in that it participates in none of the usual big-budget antics seen in mainstream movies.
The story about a young boy surrounded by his strange and bizarre family is full with poetry and magic moments.
My mother offered us a beautiful rose made of plastic.Supposedly to brighten up the room because a flower is an image,orrather, an idea of nature.The scarlet red is muted by the dust that buries it more and moreevery day.If only someone in the family would realize How unnatural this floweris with its little golden ''made in Hong Kong'' tag glued under apetal.Yet, all it takes is an effortless gesture from me to take off thetag and begin to believe in the illusion.But I refuse to touch it.I don't want to rest in the cemetery of the living dead.And now, my toes remind me I'm still here..."Why so unhappy?.
The films jumps from one time to an other (leolos birth, as a small child, as a young boy and to the present as an 12 year old) and the only help you get in following the story is a poetic voice over and an very nice soundtrack.
But once you have survived the first half hour, the film gets some more structure, and you fall into a wonderful story of a boy who hates his family because they are stupid, poor and mental unstable, but on the other hand loves his family for beïng his family.
It is tru, and leolo is way better than both very good film classics.
Jean-Claude Lauzon's semi-autobiographical Leolo, the last film he made before his death in a plane crash in 1995, is a powerful and unique masterpiece that, for me, will never grow old.
Dramatizing the thin line between art and madness, Leolo is one of the most unique films ever made: vulgar, audacious, imaginative, disturbing, yet deeply compassionate.
Though Leolo feels very personal to me, it is a film made for every outsider whose environment is so devoid of the things that nurture their souls, that, to survive, they must escape into a world of dreams, surviving only by being a spectator to their own life.12-year-old Leolo (Maxime Collin) lives in a squalid tenement in Montreal, Canada, yet to him, he is no longer Leo Lozeau but an expatriate Sicilian named Leolo Lozone.
Dreaming of his neighbor Bianca, a few years older than him, he navigates between his adolescent urges and the reality of his sordid existence, surviving only by resting his head "between two worlds, in the valley of the vanquished." He reads in the basement with only the light from a half-opened refrigerator door and writes in his journal whenever he can, finding his "only real joy in solitude.
A complex film, in French, of the genesis of a love life of a 12-year old in a miserable, tragic family afflicted by some unknown genetic disease.
With a fantastic visual style, reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Fellini ("Amarcord", especially), but also a complete original, and a mind-blowing soundtrack (that includes Tom Waits and The Rolling Stones), Jean-Claude Lauzon created the two worlds of young Leo Lauzon (played by Maxime Collin; the name Lauzon is not a coincidence): his real life with his (very) dysfunctional family in Montréal, and his imaginary life as Léolo Lozone, son of a Sicilian peasant."Léolo" isn't, however, a cute story of a child with vivid imagination.
Do not miss this movie.One of the most original films I've ever seen.
The film's protagonist, Leolo Lauzon, is a young French Canadian boy who claims to be a son of Italy, a notion he accredits to a miraculous encounter between his mother and a tomato grown in Italy.
In his spare time, he escapes the daily dysfunction of growing up by writing eloquently on scraps of paper, which he then discards, and which are then read by a local homeless man: the texts serve as the film's narration.
Though essentially a story about growing up, this is a film that can be read from many angles, and whose thematic depths span everywhere between the themes of family, fear, hate, lust, and love.
Excuse the obscurity of that analogy, but if you watch the film I think you'll find that it applies quite nicely.Some might find Leolo alienating, others revolting, and some just plane weird.
I find this odd, as many of the movies I claim to love do not do this very same thing, which I think says a lot about the substance and strength of this film.
This is a heartwarming yet powerful coming-of-age story about a boy named Leolo, spawned by accident from a bizarre union between an Italian villager, a tomato, and a fat woman!Although he's a thin, almost sickly underdog of a kid, Leolo's spirit surpasses all.Warning: When it comes to "discovering ones' sexuality," American Pie has NOTHING on this movie!.
I really liked the films complexity, brilliantly directed, with nice background soundtrack..Leo adopts Italian name Leolo.
There are many dream sequences set in Sicily Italy, the country of his beautiful neighbour Bianca.Save for young Leo and his mother during the course of this film; their entire family are in and out of institutions for the mentally disordered.We move quickly between totally unrelated scenes.
The narrative consists of many flashbacks, but does follow a loose chronology of Leo's life, a boy who is so different from his (mostly insane) family that he carefully constructs a fantasy that explains how he is not Canadian but actually Italian.
Some people may hate it because it is too crude, but it is simply genius, and amazing the way to match the poetry with the image, showing the inner world of a kid who doesn´t want to be where he is, and he makes this possible by dreaming.
The segment, in retrospect, showed what the film was about, life as seen through Leolo's eyes.
I just this minute finished watching  "Léolo" and thought I'd write a few comments here to begin the process of expunging this film from my memory - this film that I just can't imagine being called "comedy" (though there was a racy but funny scene at the very beginning describing how a "contaminated" tomato from Italy several days later accidentally impregnated Léolo's mother, as the boy's fantasy of how he came to be).The film is about a boy, Léolo (Maxime Collin) from a strange, dysfunctional family lacking in warmth, emotion, or any interest in even basic reading or writing.
They are more in than out of a mental institution.During the course of the film, young Léolo drools over the buxom Sicilian girl living next door, attempts to kill his grandfather because he blames him for all the family's problems.
Léolo masturbates himself using a piece of liver...which his mom later cooks up for the family dinner.Out of all this bizarre material, director Jean-Claude Lauzon, who died since the making of this masterpiece, has fashioned a complex, mesmerizing work of art that is semi-autobiographical, and at once a labor of love and virtuosic skill.
The director could have included a few of the bathroom scenes at the beginning of the movie to give viewers a sense of how this poor kid grew up, but it was unnecessary to interrogate people with these preverted images..
Be forewarned that there is a shocking scene late in the movie in which a live cat is abused "for the sake of"--art, the film, the story, whatever.I patiently watched the movie up to the cat scene, appreciating some of the interesting approach to storytelling and some of the beautifully shot imagery.
By the time the cat scene appeared I was already pretty fed up with the "I'm wallowing in filth and I want you to wallow in it with me" approach the director seemed to take (with a beautiful, poetic gloss to lure the viewer into this bait-and-switch movie), so it was an easy decision to turn the DVD off at that point with no regrets other than to wish the director had not felt it necessary to abuse a live animal and film the animal's obvious pain and panic for the sake of the enjoyment?
*Contains Spoilers*There are many themes presented in the stunning Quebecois film Leolo, an offbeat portrayal of a child growing up in a dysfunctional family.
Early in the film it is seen that Leo is rebellious and different than the rest of his family.
Leo's most interesting moments throughout the film come when he is alone.
The film ends with Leo alone and further isolated from his family in the hospital.
The theme of isolation serves Leolo well and helps Leo's character establish independence and appear more `normal' than his family.
Léolo is one of the most unique, and unusual films I have ever seen.
There are some particularly unpleasant scenes, including an attempted murder, the `rape' of a cat, by a group of beer swilling, glue sniffing, leather clad youths, and Léolo himself having a sexual experience with what appears to be a piece of liver.Throughout the film, these images are neatly juxtaposed with a poetic, and in places, almost lyrical dialogue.There is a lot to take on board in one viewing.
Light hearted entertainment it most certainly isn't, but it is ultimately rewarding, albeit as a sad reflection of a young boy's progression into sexual awareness, and eventual descent into the madness that, through his writing, he is continually trying to escape.This film walks a fine line between a sick and depraved collection of perverse imagery, and a poetic, gentle and yet devastating account of life.
The early tragic death of the director (who died shortly after the making of this film) prevented it from getting promoted, and the attention that it deserves.Why I think that Léolo has the recipes to perfect art:1.
It tells stories of maximum perversity that still can concern a healthy child, I don't think we are dealing with a demented individual per se.The film isn't just pulp, which it could be seen as because of the extreme material that, no doubt is supposed to shock, but there are a lot of moments and observations that ring true, like for example crazy, irrational ideas that somehow run in a family and which the children are forced to live by.
In the end all that is left of a human being, at best, is a story that is told and remembered for a moment in time.
He longs for his paramour Bianca, believes his grandfather is the source of his family's little tragedies amongst other things, and insists of being called Léolo Lazone, instead of his French-Canadian name.This is an indescribable comedy, textured with bizarre characters and unusual observations from the narrator of this film, young Léolo.
Witty, bizarre, and completely unique, this film takes some very strange turns along the way as we see how his family life effects him negatively to the point where he feels he doesn't belong anywhere near them.