Jean-Claude Lauzon - Léolo (1992)

Welcome to the world of Leolo Lozone, a 12-year-old dreamer with a hilarious life-preserving ability to recreate the world according to his imagination. Whether dealing with his scatterbrained brother or plotting the murder of his grandfather, Leolo is an incorrigible misfit touched with a lovable streak of madness. From a wild romance with his sexy next door neighbor to incredible visits to the bottom of the sea, Leolo takes refuge in a fantasy world of poems and reams where he can triumph over even the strangest of tragedies. Bizarre, belligerent and totally outrageous! (-DVD cover)




Léolo is a comic and fearless account of the terrors and joys of adolescence in an uncertain world. It is the audacious study of a 12-year-old dreamer who is convinced he is the offspring of a sperm-laden Sicilian tomato. Léolo features a rich and varied soundtrack that ranges from sacred music to Tom Waits and the Rolling Stones. (-DVD cover)




Young Leo Lozone is torn between two worlds - the squalid Montreal tenement that he inhabits with his severely dysfunctional (and largely insane) family, and the imaginative world that he constructs for himself through his writings, where he's Leolo Lozone, son of a Sicilian peasant (conceived in a bizarre act involving a tomato). And his experiences of growing up (especially his sexual development) affect his response to both these worlds… (http://imdb.com/title/tt0104782/plotsummary)




Leo is a dreamer, and his story is about the importance of dreams, and of love. The film is full of premonitions and gives many clues about events to come. It's a journey into the agonies and longings and ordeals of coming-of-age, but it's also much more. It's at times zany, playful, tragic, poetic, pensive, and thoughtful. It's filled with contrasts: innocence and depravity, sweetness and brutality, melancholy and etheriality, images of beauty and squalor, picturesque, warm vistas of Sicily and the cold starkness of tenements in Canada, a loving family cavorting on a Sunday outing and the craziness existing within that same family, just to name a few. The wonderful sensitivity and beautiful poetic quality of this film are exquisite to savor. It is a film that takes its time to tell its story, and finding that wonderful quality in a film is a true delight. So many films made in this country and in the world are compacted into staccato images that hit one's psyche like a machine gun. This one lingers on the images it presents, and imparts its message in its own time, on its own terms, and in its own unique way.This is a film that needs to be seen more than once. It's complex and deep and wide-ranging and ambitious in scope. It's full of many-sided emotions and it's about more than just what happens in the plot. (www.amazon.com)




Leolo tells the story of a young boy living in a slum. He writes in a notebook scenes of his own bizarre family life plagued with sadness, his father's scatological obsessions, his mother's unconditional love for him and his sibling's slow but inevitable descent into madness, he falls in love with a beautiful girl that does dirty favors for his lecherous grandfather, so he decides to murder him and fails. (www.amazon.com)




Each page he writes, he rips off from the notebook and throws it away. A junk-collector, to whom Leo refers as the "Verse Tamer" (the one who gave him his first and only book, that is used as a prop for a short table leg and that he reads in secret in the middle of the night) picks up these wrinkled pages and collects them, being the only one to realize the strength and beauty of the boy's prose. As time goes by, Leolo begins to slip, having failed at grasping a scrap of reason in his sad life. Leolo is a beautiful movie, photography and music blending well to wrap a heartbreaking story of dreams unborn. (www.amazon.com)










Links to previous movie posts:

From 1# to 170# please refer to page :
170 Miche...one di una donna (1982)

171 Erick... rêvée des anges (1998)
172 Mikló...ép ('Red Psalm') (1972)
173 F.W. ...onie des Grauens (1922)
174 Werne...hantom der Nacht (1979)
175 Peter... & Her Lover (1989)
176 Yasuj... ('Tokyo Story') (1953)
177 Abbas...aste of Cherry') (1997)
178 Bertrand Bonello-Le Pornographe (2001)
179 Franç...imait les femmes (1977)
180 György Pálfi-Hukkle (2002)
181 Gillo...taglia di Algeri (1966)
182 Paolo...e di San Lorenzo (1982)
183 Aleksandr Dovzhenko-Arsenal (1928)
184 Béla ...eister harmóniák (2000)
185 Jean-Claude Lauzon - Léolo (1992)