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.