The young hero of this raucous and very enjoyable third feature by Québécois director Philippe Falardeau, Léon is a 10-year-old living in the suburbs of Montreal circa 1968. Among his favourite activities are stealing from neighbours’ homes, vandalizing whatever he leaves behind and, last but not least, mounting elaborate suicide attempts. In fact, It’s Not Me, I Swear! begins with Léon trying to hang himself from a tree, which is as good a sign as any that this is no kid’s film.
That Léon remains oddly endearing despite his questionable choice of hobbies is a testament to the winning qualities of both Falardeau’s film and Antoine L’Ecuyer, its precociously talented star. It also helps that Léon’s actions have a clear cause, that being the sudden disintegration of his family. After his beloved mother Madeleine (Suzanne Clément) leaves her husband and two sons to go find herself in Greece, Léon is free to run amok on his suburban street and in the nearby countryside. For company, he has his similarly troubled friend Léa (Catherine Faucher) and his older brother Jérôme (Gabriel Maillé), who also longs for a return to some kind of normal family life.
That possibility is, of course, scuppered by Léon’s increasing taste for anarchy. His antics only get more extreme as the film progresses, with the viewer never knowing whether the ramifications of his actions will turn out to be comic or tragic.
By deftly exploiting that tension and carefully navigating the material’s shifts between light and dark tones, Falardeau is able to convey the volatile nature of early adolescence with unusual accuracy. His script is based on a pair of semi-autobiographical novels by Bruno Hébert, a writer whose family life must’ve been truly tumultuous, seeing as his sister Isabelle Hébert wrote Maman est chez le coiffeur, last year’s other great Québécois coming-of-age film . Though Falardeau is clearly conscious of the rich history of French-Canadian movies about wild boys — there are strong echoes here of Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo and Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. — he also draws from two other classic films about childhood, Francois Truffaut’s Small Change and Lasse Hallstrom’s My Life as a Dog.
Like those films, It’s Not Me, I Swear! has none of the condescension that can ruin movies about youngsters. Instead, Falardeau’s movie manages to sum up everything that is exhilarating, wondrous and terrifying about being a boy. So what’s bad news for Léon’s parents and neighbours is good news for viewers.
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