page_title: Léolo
section_title: Themes and interpretations
hierarchical_section_title: Léolo / Themes and interpretations
caption_attribution_description: English: George Melnyk in 2014
context_page_description: Léolo is a 1992 Canadian coming of age-fantasy film by director Jean-Claude Lauzon. The film tells the story of a young boy named Léo "Léolo" Lauzon, played by Maxime Collin, who engages in an active fantasy life while growing up with his Montreal family, and begins to have sexual fantasies about his neighbour Bianca, played by Giuditta del Vecchio. The film also stars Ginette Reno, Pierre Bourgault, Andrée Lachapelle, Denys Arcand, Julien Guiomar and Germain Houde. Gilbert Sicotte narrates the film as the adult Léolo.
  With a story developed by Lauzon as a semi-autobiographical work, the project was supported by producer Lyse Lafontaine as a co-production with France. Filming took place in Montreal and Sicily in 1991. It was Lauzon's final film, as he died in a plane crash in 1997 while working on his next project.
  Initially released in the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, Léolo won three Genie Awards, including Best Original Screenplay for Lauzon, losing Best Motion Picture to Naked Lunch. It later benefited from a resurgence of interest, leading to critics and filmmakers adding it to the Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time in 2015.
context_section_description: New York remarked on the classical allusions in the story:
  Léolo dreams of Sicily, of sunlight and Greek ruins, and of a slender Italian girl, Bianca, a neighbor, whom he imagines standing on a hill in Taormina singing to him. Léolo is meant to be a modern Dante sitting in one of the dark circles of his hell, and Bianca is his Beatrice.
  The story is also related with a "dreamlike environment", with "choral music" that evokes "the possibility of spiritual transcendence". Part of the way the narrative shifts from natural to fantasy elements is through the Word Tamer character, who becomes "an omniscient god-like observer". Author Bill Marshall assessed the Word Tamer as one of the benign elders, as opposed to the bad ones, and hypothesized that the Word Tamer's abode, Federico Fellini's Cinecittà property, symbolizes the film's "exaggerated, grotesque realism".
  Some Canadian analysis of Léolo has related to possible political symbolism and Quebec's national identity. In 1992 at the Toronto International Film Festival, programming director Piers Handling called the film an "epitaph for Quebec", in which the title character rejects his Quebecois identity and joins another world by fantasy. Canadian historian George Melnyk remarked that Pierre Bourgault is a prominent Quebec separatist, but is not allowed to say much in the film, which also features the muscular Fernand intimidated by a smaller English Canadian, and non-Quebecois music, concluding the film represented a "national identity crisis". Among the cosmopolitan music uses is Tibetan-style chanting, and songs by The Rolling Stones and Tom Waits. Film scholar Jim Leach wrote that in real life, Lauzon would call himself a Canadian director, despite contemporary belief Quebec cinema was distinct. In the narration, the setting "Mile End, Montreal, Canada" does not mention Quebec, and Léolo's supposed Italian father refers to the tomatoes as destined for "America" rather than Quebec, though they are sold in Montreal. It is also thought the film is set in the late 1950s, in the "old Quebec" before the Quiet Revolution.
  However, Lauzon denied the film had any political meaning, saying he was not an intellectual, and his film "does not have the flag draped all over it". He also said he had an admiration for the Italian people. Leach questioned if the film is set before the Quiet Revolution, saying if Léolo was born in the 1950s, the 12-year-old character lived in 1965, and Ducharme's book seen in the film was published in 1967. Marshall noted the Ducharme novel would place the story in the 1960s, but argued "otherwise the feel is 1950s".
caption: Canadian historian George Melnyk discussed the film's possible statements on Quebec's "national identity crisis".
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