SnoopyStyle Léo Lauzon is a young boy living in a Montreal slum with his weird family. He doesn't get along with his grandfather. His older brother Fernand starts pumping up after getting picked on by a bully. His sister Rita is mentally disturbed. He writes in his book and has an imaginary world. He doesn't see any similarity between himself and his rotund silent hard-working father. He imagines he comes from another father who masturbated into a crate of tomatoes in Sicily. His mother gets impregnated after getting knocked into the pile of tomatoes.This is one weird movie. It has a lot of odd sexual allusions. The memorable scenes are utterly unique. I don't really like narrators in general. I wish the movie would have more of a structure to the story. His coming-of-age story meanders too much. Nevertheless, this is a good and completely different kind of movie.

DanKIT21 Other users seem to have enjoyed this film, but I thought it was revolting. Who wants to watch a movie where a kid puts raw meat in the bathtub, then slides it into his underwear, and has an orgasm with it? Oh and then his family eats the meat for dinner. Okay, fine so it's a human interest story about a kid growing up in a highly dysfunctional family... but the narrator doesn't seem to be any less dysfunctional than his relatives.To make things even more interesting, Leolo's family believes that in order to avoid disease in their impoverished surroundings, one must "shit" all the time, so Leolo grows up taking daily laxative shock treatments. His parents even check to make sure he has had a good BM or they sit in the same room with him while he excretes.Can I just say that I don't understand why ANYONE would want to watch this movie? The only reason I did is that my dad had rented it and said it was "about a boy growing up." Sounds harmless, right? The director could have included a few of the bathroom scenes at the beginning of the movie to give viewers a sense of how this poor kid grew up, but it was unnecessary to interrogate people with these preverted images.

Scarecrow-88 A young boy whose birth father is a "contaminated tomato" from Italy he insists, rejects his family and escapes his meager existence into his own thoughts, shelterly painted on his diary. He longs for his paramour Bianca, believes his grandfather is the source of his family's little tragedies amongst other things, and insists of being called Léolo Lazone, instead of his French-Canadian name.This is an indescribable comedy, textured with bizarre characters and unusual observations from the narrator of this film, young Léolo. Witty, bizarre, and completely unique, this film takes some very strange turns along the way as we see how his family life effects him negatively to the point where he feels he doesn't belong anywhere near them. He holds on to what little proper sanity he has left by clutching his yearnings for Bianca. If he loses her, then perhaps the final life-string will be forever severed.This film is beautifully photographed, but despite it's centering around a child's thoughts and meanderings, this deals with very adult material. It can also be hard to watch, though at times the absurd black comedy, done completely straight, is brilliant and realistically accurate.

brences I absolutely adore this movie.I first saw it with a group of friends at the local college town art cinema when it was first released. When it ended, hardly anyone in the theater even stirred, slowly and quietly rising only after the credits ran out. Afterwards, we went for drinks, as had been the plan for the evening, but it took a long time for us to break out of the film's spell and begin to really talk. When we finally did, each of us was relieved to find that everyone else had been as moved by it as each had individually.The reason for all this doubt and anxiety, I believe, is the film itself. It doesn't rely on any conventions at all, nor does it allow the viewer to respond via convention. What it does do is provide the viewer with an intensely private view of the characters. You get to see them in broad daylight at times and on occasions where one would most want to be absolutely alone. Because of this willingness to really expose its characters, a more honest self-relation is demanded in response and for a response. (In this respect in reminds me a bit of Milan Kundera's novels, during the reading of which I often find myself embarrassed for the characters that I am there intruding on their privacy.) I think what myself and my friends (then still young adults) feared was revealing something about ourselves--a kind of fragility and ambivalence in one's own self-relation that one normally represses, but which this film repeatedly draws to the surface. Wouldn't admitting that one was moved by these characters be also an admission that one could relate to them in some more profound way? Yes, and I have felt just a little bit less alone in the world since seeing Leolo. Not better perhaps, but less alone.A truly great, great movie. Rent it on VHS, grab a Canadian DVD off of Ebay, or pester IFC to show it again (record it because you'll want to see it again), but don't miss it.