Leolo

Growing up in a tough French-Canadian slum neighborhood in Montreal, Leo Lauzon (Maxime Collin) concocts elaborate fictions about himself and his family to escape his dreary life and surroundings. He writes down some of his more bizarre fantasies, and his discarded notes are found in the rubbish by an elderly teacher (Pierre Bourgault, credited as the "Word Tamer"). The Word Tamer tries without success to track Leo down before the boy finally succumbs to the encroaching insanity to which his entire family is heir.

The bulk of the film is driven by a voice-over reading of Leo's notes, describing a series of episodes and scenarios that are loosely, sometimes thematically, linked. The boy adopts the name "Leolo" because he imagines that his mother (Ginette Reno) conceived him after falling, at the market, on an imported tomato upon which an Italian farm laborer had masturbated. Leo's father (Roland Blouin), a laborer, is obsessed with regular bowel movements, force-feeding laxatives to his children, who also include Leo's sisters Rita (Genevieve Samson) and Nanette (Marie-Helene Montpetit) and older brother Fernand (Germain Houde). Father doesn't allow his kids to sleep at night until they defecate. Since Leo doesn't take the laxative, his life becomes a round of surreal deception, including borrowing extra excrement from Nanette and secretly depositing it in the toilet for his father's approval.

Leo's grandfather (Julien Guiomar) sexually exploits the beautiful, poverty-stricken girl next door, Bianca (Giuditta Del Vecchio), with whom Leo is in love. (One of Leo's recurring fantasies involves escaping "back" to Sicily with Bianca.) Leo's brother becomes a bodybuilder after being humiliated by a local hood, only to find himself paralyzed by cowardice when the hood confronts him again years later. Leo becomes sexually aware, masturbating into the liver his mother buys for dinner. He goes on a diving expedition in the local harbor with Fernand, salvaging valuable material from an underwater junkyard. After an unsuccessful attempt to kill his grandfather (who has apparently tried to kill him), he is sent to the same psychiatric hospital where his sisters spend much of their time. Released, he hangs out with a gang of local ruffians, but ultimately ends up--together with the rest of his family--in the asylum.

Structured more according to thematic than narrative demands, LEOLO is a jumbled blend of autobiography and surreal psychodrama. It's not an easy film to watch, alternating as it does between visceral, unpleasant scenes of degradation and painful insights into the mental suffering of the protagonist. And the point that is being driven home--that the world is a mean, ugly place that brutalizes the good, the true and the beautiful--is hardly a new one.

Yet this is a work of undeniable power, shaped by an obviously gifted filmmaker. Lauzon's images, whether beautiful or revolting, are haunting and memorable. Some sequences-- particularly Leo's diving excursion--achieve an almost hallucinatory transcendence, while others capture a genuine psychic terror. The scene where the pumped-up Fernand capitulates, once again, to the hoodlum, is wrenching, and says more about wrestling with one's inner demons than a thousand Hollywood-produced inspirational tales.

(Adult situations, sexual situations, nudity, profanity, violence.) leave a comment