3 Mulligans

Okay…Wow!
And I mean wow in both a good and disturbing way.
I went into this movie with an open mind even though the description on the dvd tried its best to skew me in another direction altogether.
Really, who writes those things?
I am convinced most of the people just look at the stars and make something up that sounds sellable.
I was prepared for a mild mind bender but see above “Wow”.
For some reason, little Leolo has gotten it into his mind he is Italian.
He is not, of course, but that doesn’t stop our hero from correcting his family when he is called by his given name and not his self-appointed Italian name.
Leolo lives in a world that becomes increasingly dependent on his imagination and he does have a doozy.
I found at times I had trouble telling the difference between what he was imagining and what was real…much like I think he begins to feel.
This movies chronicles his young life and also introduces him to sex.
Along the way, we mix in a healthy dose on mental illness, fetishes, violence, and also a scene that makes me look at tomatoes in a completely different light.
The whole movie has not stayed with me but certain scenes are difficult to forget.
The whole thing where his brother is being bullied and then he turns into this muscle-bound hulk, bound and determined to not let that happen again, was making me wonder if Leolo was actually imagining his brother getting bigger or if he actually was.
The fight scene with the bully near the end was surprising and done in a non-hollywood way.
It was hard to watch, but well done.
I guess thats where I am headed with this review.
The is VERY hard to watch in some parts…but also very well done.
There is a scene where Leolo, after determining his Grandfather is the cause of most of the mental illness that haunts a good part of his family, must rid the world of his existence, therefore saving his family.
The sheer determination that Leolo goes through to execute his grandfather is amazing.
It reminded me of the hayfort mazes we used to build in the barn.
Dad would always say” You know, you boys complain about bailing hay but then you spend 3 times the energy and effort restacking, tunneling, and building God knows what, just for fun.
Leolo makes this contraption to do away with his Grandfather…almost succeeds but ends up injured himself and under mental evaluation.
There is a scene near the end where they are shocking Leolo not with electricity, but in a large tub, suspended by straps, in cold ice water.
He is just left there for what we assume is all night.
Good Lord, did treatments like that really happen?
His childhood memeries of his mother and father are very exact.
Maybe not the nicest, but the most vivid.
He describes feeling safe in between his mothers breasts as he she hugs him almost with the same pleasure as he describes his fathers overly round face.
I guess its funny the way you remember things.
Even if you are a closet Italian.
I almost turned this off a couple of times just because I wasn’t in the mood for some of the darkness.
But then I found myself lost a little whenever Leolo would go to his imagination and that took me with him.
This a very hard movie to watch in some parts.
But it is well fleshed out and I really enjoyed how true the characters were to themselves throughout the movie.

But I will NEVER ask my wife or girlfriend to bite my toenails off….I mean, have you seen my feet?

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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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