Léolo (1992) review

It's no wonder that the French-Canadian boy (who Lauzon based on himself) thinks of himself as being Italian, because this movie is a poor replica of a Fellini fantasy. Even for a coming of age story it's thin - Lil' Lauzon (that's Léolo to you) constructs a dream world where his family is insane and he's cursed with a poet's heart, but that 'poet's heart' only manages to turn his childhood into one long jerk-off and his parents and siblings into individuals unworthy of his wondrous presence. The boy's parents never struck me as being 'that terrible' - if anything, grandpa is senile and Dad has a scat fetish - and the defiling of a tomato, a nice cut of meat and a declawed cat in a movie this scatterbrained doesn't come across as wistful, but rather quite stupid.