Léolo

Léolo (1992) is Jean-Claude Lauzon's cult coming-of-age film, now streaming online on iFILM. A boy from a poor Montreal tenement refuses to believe he's his father's son and invents a wilder origin: that his mother was impregnated by a Sicilian tomato.

"Because I dream, I am not," he tells himself, hiding in fantasy while the world around him slowly unravels. His family is falling apart — a lecherous grandfather, brothers and sisters vanishing one by one into a psychiatric ward — and Léolo pours all his longing into Bianca, the Italian girl next door. Lauzon cuts between squalid reality and tender, absurd daydreams without warning.

Lauzon made only two features before dying in a plane crash, yet Léolo keeps turning up on lists of the greatest Canadian films ever made. Its narrated voice, dreamlike montage and grimy poetry sit closer to Fellini than to any tidy childhood drama. Harsh, strange and hard to shake, it's plainly not a film for everyone. Stream Léolo online on iFILM.