LÉOLO Movie Review

French-Canadian director Jean-Claude Lauzon's 1992 Léolo is a powerful, frightening, sometimes magical movie that suggests the work of a true visionary. This is a portrait of a child growing up in a mad Montreal house-hold, and it's told—both in its narration and its expressionist images—from that child's point of view. Young Leo has renamed himself Léolo for what he believes to be a very good reason; he's convinced that his heritage is at least partly Italian, due to the fact that his mother was directly impregnated by a sperm-laden Italian tomato—a Sicilian tomato, to be precise. Therefore the sperm that sired him was presumably provided by a Sicilian as well, relieving Léolo of the burden of being the offspring of his ghoulish father, and distancing him from his equally creepy siblings. Léolo spends more time in the bathroom than the adolescent Alex Portnoy, but bowel movements—and proof thereof—are his family's raison d'etre. The hours there provide him with the opportunity to fantasize both sexually and homicidally, devising a fantastic, Rube Goldberg—style demise for his vile grandfather. Léolo does what a lot of more conventional “family” films do, and that is to show us the world through an imaginative child's eyes. But Léolο is no ordinary child, and his fantasies reflect the grim, ugly realities of his life. One of the rare intelligent films about children that is not for children, this is obscenely witty yet genuinely shocking moviemaking; as befits a perceptive and uncompromising film about an abusive upbringing, Léolo is a nightmare.

NEXT STOP … The Blood of a Poet, Heavenly Creatures, Cria

1992 107m/C CA Maxime Collin, Julien Guiomar, Ginette Reno, Pierre Bourgault, Yves Montmarquette, Roland Blouin, Giuditta del Vecchio; D: Jean-Claude Lauzon; W: Jean-Claude Lauzon. Genie Awards '92: Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Original Screenplay. VHS, LV NLC, ING