The Great Movies III

Here he wordlessly uses time and space to establish the routine and serenity of the household arrangements between father and daughter, in a sequence showing them coming and going, upstairs and down, through the rooms and central corridors of their house. They know their way around each other. Late in the film, threatened by the marriage, Noriko keeps picking things up and putting them on a table, compulsively acting out her domestic happiness.

So much happens out of sight in the film, implied but not shown. Noriko smiles but is not happy. Her father passively accepts what he hates is happening. The aunt is complacent, implacable, maddening. She gets her way. It is universally believed, just as in a Jane Austen novel, that a woman of a certain age is in want of a husband. Late Spring is a film about two people who desperately do not believe this, and about how they are undone by their tact, their concern for each other, and their need to make others comfortable by seeming to agree with them.

came in after a midnight screening this year at Cannes, and found Richard Corliss leaning over a yellow legal pad in the dining room of the Hotel Splendid. He was, he said, working on the list of the hundred greatest films of all time, which he and Richard Schickel would soon publish in Time magazine. "Which one are you writing about now?"I asked. "Leolo,"he said. Yes. Leolo. A film that stirs in the shadows of memory for everyone who has ever seen it, a film that cannot be classified and can hardly be explained, a film left orphaned by the early death of its director, Jean-Claude Lauzon, who died with his girlfriend while piloting his Cessna in northern Canada in 1997.

He made only two features, Night Zoo (1987) and Leolo (1992). He could have made more, but spent his time shooting commercials, or fishing. He was believed to be the most gifted young filmmaker in Canada, but when the elder statesman Norman Jewison offered him a job directing Gene Hackman in a thriller, he turned it down, rudely. Ken Turan of the LosAngeles Times believes Leolo might have won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1992 if Lauzon hadn't made an obscene suggestion to Jamie Lee Curtis, one of the jurors. Turan tells me he heard the story from Lauzon himself: "He found himself next to Jamie Lee at the buffet at the Hotel du Cap. He introduced himself and said, as I remember it, `What the boy in the film does to the piece of liver, I want to do to you."' The only caveat raised by this story is that Jamie Lee Curtis is not a shrinking violet and might as plausibly have laughed as taken offense.

I met Lauzon once, at lunch after Night Zoo premiered at Cannes. He was long haired, outspoken, a little wild, ready to offend or take offense. His movie was about an ex-con whose father is dying; the old man's deathbed wish is to shoot an elephant, and so they break into the Montreal Zoo with his dad in a wheelchair. You get the feeling, after seeing that film and Leolo, that they are not a million miles removed from reality. There was mental illness all through his family, his childhood was not easy, and his hero Leolo says, "They say I am French Canadian, but because I dream, I am not. They say he is my father, but I know I am not his son because he is crazy. Because I dream, I know I am not."

Because he dreams, he thinks he is Italian, and the man posing as his father is not his real father. The boy in the movie is born Leo Lauzon, but renames himself Leo Lozone. In his dreams, his real father is a Sicilian who masturbates on a box full of tomatoes destined for Quebec. His mother falls on the tomatoes in a Montreal street market, squishing them, and nine months later Leolo is born. He spends the entire movie trying to get his family to stop calling him Leo.

If this sounds like a chapter from Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, the film itself is not only comic but darkly angry. It centers on the adventures of Leolo (Maxime Collin) around the age of twelve, when he is not a cute teenager but a tortured and introverted boy in a family seething with insanity. His family members cycle in and out of the nearby madhouse as if it's a spa, and homelife is dominated by the belief of his father (Roland Blouin) that all human health depends upon a daily bowel movement. "Push, Leo, push!" urges his mother (Ginette Reno), a fat, good-hearted matriarch who loves the boy but is helpless to understand him. The house is tyrannized by Grandfather (Julien Guiomar), whose toenails Leolo is made to trim with his own teeth.