3 Mulligans

Léolo is the story of a childhood that is filled with longing, confusion, and darkness. A sense of bleak, ill-fated lives seems to pervade the entire world, not just Leolo’s, and I finished the movie feeling like life had no anchors for hope — or especially sanity. A dry summary of the plot would fail to capture the impressionistic nature of the story and the movie offers few traditional Hollywood setups or explanations. It’s just life: brutal and meaningless. That is not to say the movie is confusing. In fact, it is quite straightforward. But it is to say that looking for deeper motivations and asking why Leolo’s situation is what it is misses the point that children are helpless in a world that is scripted by adults.

Much of the story is told by Léolo himself through his writing (narrated for the viewer) which reveals his inner thoughts and reactions to life with his disturbed family. I couldn’t help wonder how much of Léolo’s story was the writer-director’s own. Besides the fact that the main character and the director share the same names (Lauzon) and the same hometown (Montreal), the movie is saturated with a sense of an adult’s recollections of childhood. The Word Tamer (a mysterious character who is perhaps the only benevolent figure in the movie) is an adult trying to help Léolo, but his abilities to intervene in Léolo’s life are limited. Even though the Word Tamer and Léolo appear in a scene together, I couldn’t shake the feeling they were the same person: the boy falling into oblivion and the man helplessly watching in recollection of his own childhood.

I found the whole movie very believable (yes, even that scene) except for the opening with the tomato which seemed out of place. It barely got a quick laugh, but didn’t match the tone of the rest of the movie or Léolo’s tenuous grasp of sex. My first reaction to the end of the movie and the setup for it was that it was too abrupt. But after considering it more, I think it fit the rest of the movie well.

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Whenever a film combines mismatched elements – seriousness and humor, graphic scenes and vague ideas, unsettling images and comforting ones – I feel obligated to enjoy it. Léolo was bound to succeed on this level, until halfway through when it sank to one side and left me feeling only one thing – depressed. What started off looking like The Return Of Amelie, turned into Breaking The Waves II. Even so, I recommend seeing it, just not with my usual level of enthusiasm.

It was easy relating to Léolo’s back story, in which a pre-teen boy fantasizes about growing up in an environment much different from his own. What makes this story unique, however, is that the boy doesn’t just start with the present and go forward, he goes back to the very beginning – how he was conceived – in order to reinvent himself in a more thorough manner. This represents the movie’s funniest and most memorable scenes. Then, he addresses the issue of his name. Instead of settling on the French-Canadian Leo Lozeau, he insists on being called Léolo Luzone because it reflects the country with which he’d rather be associated, Italy. As Leo examines each member of his family, the reasoning behind his obsessive fantasies becomes clear; his situation is bleak and he desperately needs an escape.

Some of the fictional scenes were hard to watch, but only because I knew they weren’t real. Whenever Leo is pictured in a simple, normal setting, that ideal image was bound to disappear and give way to reality. The picnic scene is the best example and it left me hoping that at least one vision came from a pleasant memory.  I kept looking for proof that it actually happened, but it didn’t. As the movie progressed, Leo’s condition became increasingly serious and Léolo concludes with a tragic and powerful ending.

I enjoy having my emotions twisted into knots and pulled in several directions and by that definition, Léolo worked very well. But even with its odd mix of traits, its only lasting impression on me was that of feeling sad about its outcome.

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