Léolo

Leo lives in a poor quarter of Montreal. Everyone in his family has something wrong: his older brother took up bodybuilding after a beating and is still afraid, his sisters are in hospital, his grandfather is strange, and his mother is trying to hold the house together. Leo refuses to be a child of this family. He invents another story: his mother fell onto a tomato brought from Italy at a market, and a man had touched that tomato before; so his father is Italian and his name is Léolo. He writes. He hides what he writes around the house. Jean-Claude Lauzon writes and directs. Maxime Collin plays Leo. It is a Canadian production. The film was shown at Cannes and is counted among the most cited works of Canadian cinema. Lauzon made only two features; he died in a plane crash a few years later. The form is loose and poetic; the narration comes from what the boy writes and the real is not separated from the imagined. The register is hard; poverty, mental illness and violence are shown directly and the narrative softens none of them. The choice of music is unusual; very different kinds are set side by side through the film. Some scenes are found uncomfortable even now and the film protects the viewer nowhere. Who it is for: viewers who like personally and formally bold films. Who it is not for: some scenes are hard to bear, the structure is loose, and the ending without hope.