léolo

Director: jean-claude lauzon

Actor: maxime collin,ginette reno,gilbert sicotte,julien guiomar

Data Published: Wed Sep 16 1992

Genres: Comedy,Drama

Key Words: hereditary insanity,mental illness,obsessive compulsive,tomato,dark humor

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104782/

WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9olo

Description: Léolo is a movie starring Maxime Collin, Ginette Reno, and Gilbert Sicotte. Young Leo Lauzon is torn between two worlds - the squalid Montreal tenement that he inhabits with his severely dysfunctional (and largely insane) family,...

Plot: In Mile End, Montreal, Léo Lauzon is a young boy living in a tenement with his dysfunctional family, serving as the unreliable narrator. He uses his active fantasy life and the book L'avalée des avalés by Québécois novelist Réjean Ducharme to escape the reality of his life. He feels his father is insane and denies being his son. After having a dream revealing his mother was impregnated after falling into a cart of tomatoes contaminated by an Italian man's semen, Léo identifies as Italian rather than French Canadian and adopts the name Léolo Lozone. Growing up in an apartment with a rat in the bathtub, a turkey and a family obsessed with regular bowel movements, Léolo continues to write. His writings are discovered by the Word Tamer, a reincarnation of Don Quixote who searches through trash for letters and photographs. Léolo observes a neighbouring young woman named Bianca and imagines her singing to him from a closet, emitting a white light. His grandfather, who Léolo believes attempted to murder him by holding him under a pool, helps her financially and extorts her for sexual favours, revealing her breasts and putting his feet in her mouth. Léolo begins to fantasize about Bianca sexually and discovers masturbation. Meanwhile, his brother Fernand, after being beaten by a bully and failed in a special education class, builds up impressive muscles. The Word Tamer, continuously monitoring Léolo's thoughts, reads of the boy's hopes for how Fernand's muscles will make them invincible. However, upon being confronted by the bully for a second time, Fernand is overwhelmed with fear and is beaten again while Léolo watches in shock. Finally convinced his grandfather is responsible for all of the family's troubles, Léolo attempts to lower a noose and hang his grandfather while he is in the bath. His grandfather sees Léolo doing it and is choked, before finally being freed, with Léolo injured in the process. Léolo subsequently goes to the hospital, where he is told his actions could constitute attempted murder, though he is not charged. Reacting with horror to the ways other boys are pursuing sex, he seeks out the services of a prostitute named Regina. Upon later becoming ill, he ends up in the same institution where many other members of his family have been treated at.