Leolo
A film by Jean-Claude Lauzon
From late June at Kino, Melbourne
Reviewed by Mario Giorgetti
Canadian writer-director Jean-Claude Lauzon, whose first film, Night Zoo (1987), was well awarded but left many critics unconvinced, establishes with Leolo a solid reputation for a distinct if at times driven and almost deranged artistic genius, boldly treading the line between lunacy and lucidity.
Lauzon believes a film should be an intense and involving experience and have you on your knees with its emotional power. In this obliquely autobiographical film, he tells a powerful tale that is at once poignant, funny, seriously poetic and full of the candour, warmth and fantastic light of childhood revisited.
It's a familiar coming-of-age scenario wherein 12-year-old Leo Lozeau, a highly intelligent, sensitive boy, grows up in a stifling working-class milieu in a shabby part of town. He knows he doesn't belong here, but he can't escape his fate, so he spins a private fantasy and reinvents his life and his origins to suit himself.
In his imagined world, little Leo (Maxime Collin), born into a poor Montreal family plagued by congenital insanity, renames himself Leolo Lozone.
His real father is a pathetic man on the edge of lunacy whose mission in life seems to be to keep the doctor away by making sure everyone in the family has at least one bowel movement a day. So Leolo fantasises that his mother (Ginette Reno), the only rational member of his family, was accidentally impregnated by a tomato carrying the potent sperm of a Sicilian man named Lozone, who thus fortuitously became his father.
One by one his two sisters, his muscle-bound but childlike older brother and his father end up tied to a bed in the insane asylum, staring at the walls in catatonic stupor. It's up to Leolo now to try to break the cycle of insanity, and to that end he must destroy
his grandfather, the bad seed and contemptible wellhead of all this madness, the dirty old man who has even tainted the lovely Bianca, a teenage neighbour and object of Leolo's awakening sexual desire.
In his secret journal, of which page after page ends up in the daily trash, Leolo pens the story of his life and pours into it all the pathos and poetry of his circumstances. In his inverted Cartesian maxim, "I dream, therefore I am not", he lives outside reality, basking in the white light that radiates from his closet, opening into a sunny Mediterranean dream world and, if he's not careful, insanity.
Leolo combines tragic and comic elements in a style reminiscent of Balzac and in subject matter not unlike Terence Davies' autobiographical film The Long Day Closes, only much more colourful and less self-indulgent. It is a romantic story told with warmth and compassion. An original piece of work and a deeply affecting cinema experience.