Word: leolo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...proof of these dour bromides is found in five new movies about kids. Two are from abroad: Gianni Amelio's Italian drama Il Ladro di Bambini (Stolen Children) and Jean-Claude Lauzon's Leolo, from Quebec. Three are from Disney: Duwayne Dunham's Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, Mikael Salomon's A Far Off Place and Stephen Sommers' The Adventures of Huck Finn...
...dramatic arc from bondage to liberation to mute acceptance of fate's bureaucratic whims. For a movie that worms inside a child's hopes and fears, that understands how kids can be both shaped by their family and in righteous rebellion against it, you should see -- immediately -- Leolo...
...rest of the family gets along well enough -- "at times," Leo says, "their lunacies harmonized" -- but he is an outsider, an orphan. These people think he is theirs. Leo knows better: "Because I dream, I'm not." He is half Italian: Leolo Lozone, conceived during his mother's fruitful collision with a sperm-soaked Sicilian tomato. A bright, lonely boy could not be the spawn of this horrid clan. Surely he is not destined to replicate their mean lives and dead-end careers or the madness to which they are all heir. And so, in this slum of bruised humanity...
...child, isolated inside his best instincts, survive for long, when family, school, class, the whole sordid world conspire to crush him? Leo can't. But Leolo can; his autobiography is saved by the one stranger who might have helped him. Certainly Lauzon, who testifies that this grotesque family portrait is based on fact, survived and thrived -- to make a beautiful film. His story, in this boldly voluptuous telling, reminds us of two truths: no remembered childhood is so bizarre that it cannot have occurred; and the surest way to purge demons is to impale them on the page or screen...
...Leolo finally declares, "And I shall rest my head between two worlds, in the Valley of the Vanquished." That is where we all live, suspended between childhood and its haunting afterimage. Hollywood wants us to think of youth as a ripping yarn, where every adventure has a happy ending. Leolo sees childhood as the acid test for maturity...