Leolo (1994)

Leolo, Jean-Claude Lauzon's bittersweet shaggy-dog story of a boy (Maxime Collin) growing up in a mad, dysfunctional family, is wildly inventive, subversive, sensual, and filled with compassion for its weird and troubled humanity. Narrated from Leolo's journals, the film has a striking novelistic quality. ''Solitude is my castle,'' writes Leolo, who views his world (a cowardly bodybuilding brother, an immense and loving mother, a father obsessed with the regularity of his family's defecation) with the clarity and detachment of one who has achieved a fearful and painful isolation even before childhood's end. A-