Leo the Last is part of this subgenre of films that heavily uses metaphor and symbolism to try and explain, well, everything. Darren Aronofsky's mother! Is a more modern example, and Lindsay Anderson's Britannia Hotel is another. Considering the presence of Marcello Mastroianni, regular star of Federico Fellini's films, I'd say that this is Boorman's effort at making a Felliniesque farce, and I don't think it really works. While it's not a complete drag with moments of genuine comedy and a point that I think has some consideration, the loose narrative undermines pretty much everything while also eliminating any real focus on the idea at play making the final descent into anarchy random rather than pointed. Being John Boorman's first work as a credited writer on his own directed film, I suspect that this is the closest Boorman has come to being fully himself through film, and I got real Ralph Bakshi vibes.
Leo (Mastroianni) is the last in the line for the throne of a country that no longer exists. Upon the death of his father, he arrives at his father's house in England, the only pristine mansion on a street of darkened houses all lined up against each other in English fashion. Reportedly, this film was very expensive, and this outdoor set had to have been one of the main reasons for that cost. It's actually two blocks with large facades and several interiors, and it's too precisely designed to have just been found (the destruction of one building at the end makes it obvious that they didn't just find this stuff somewhere). The producers, Chartoff and Winkler, ended up regretting the cost on Boorman's project because it ended up not making its money back, not even close, and it's obvious why. This is effectively an art film with a huge budget behind it, the sort of film that just does not appeal to general audiences. Boorman had already built up a following among the young based on his first three films (Steven Soderbergh is a giant fan of Point Blank, for instance), and the studio bet big on his appeal expanding out from there. It didn't work, and the large set design gets wasted in a film that no one wanted to see.
Anyway, Leo arrives and we get an introduction to all of the main members of his household told through a whispered commentary like we're overhearing members of the audience around us (imagine what Boorman would have done with a modern sound mixing board), and since the technique largely ends with this scene, it feels like Boorman trying to paper over narrative deficiencies by using voiceover to do the work that he didn't do in the film itself. The main part of this household are Laszlo (Vladek Sheybal), the chief of staff, and Margaret (Billie Whitelaw), Leo's betrothed. Laszlo is continuing Leo's father's work of organizing some kind of revolution with guns and secret meetings in the house's basement. Margaret is an unserious person who is out to get whatever money and position Leo has.
In this hermetically sealed and off-kilter world, Leo feels trapped and he uses a telescope to look out to the world that surrounds him. He focuses on a black immigrant Salambo (Glenna Forster-Jones), her boyfriend Roscoe (Calvin Lockhart), and her family. With little money, Salambo and Roscoe cause a distraction at the local store and steal a turkey (the amount of destruction in the store is extreme and points to the fact that Boorman didn't really consider what he was putting on screen all that closely since it actually flies in the face of what his supposed final point is). Salambo ends up getting sexually assaulted by Kowalski (Kenneth Warren) on her return, and it causes Leo to try and be active in helping her, only for the neighbors to save her followed by Roscoe finding out and then assaulting Kowalski. The police come and take Roscoe away, leaving Salambo without her protector. Leo decides to become more active again, so he sends the family a bunch of food and drink, leading to Salambo's father dying of a heart attack.
At the same time, Leo's life amidst the upper crust of this dead country continues with a party where everyone is grotesquely eating food (an obvious contrast to the effort to steal a single bird for the poor family), the discovery of the revolution that Leo tries to stop by kicking everyone out, and an episode in a pool where a doctor convinces everyone that they are experiencing euphoria by bouncing around naked. This is one moment of genuine comedy as Leo refuses to fall into the mob mentality with shrugs, contrasting everyone's else's descriptions of joy with his determination that he just feels wet, that only changing when he decides to help Salambo and her family.
Now, this movie is just kind of a mess of ideas, but at its core seems to be this idea that the aristocracy is an outmoded style of governance, that renters deserve rights, and that society needs to burn to pave a path for something new. The racial angle is obvious and points to an idea of colonialism, which is aided by the fact that Leo isn't even English while having his own little fiefdom in England. However, it's a mix of images that don't actually align all that well. As the film goes into its final act, with Leo's household turning against him because of his desire to give everything away to the people while, at the same time, Salambo has to go into prostitution in the absence of Roscoe, aided by a black pimp, everything just becomes a mush of images and ideas that fail to actually align into something cohesive.
The bigger problem is that the film is largely boring and unpleasant, though. Aside from some nice comedic moments from Mastroianni, the film is just kind of hard to look at. While I admire the scale of the set design, it's bland and hard to look at, embracing a color scheme that heavy on browns and blacks while desaturating the image even further through filters. There's no color or life in the film's visuals. Boorman was a strong compositional filmmaker, so his frame is always well-composed, but when the colors are drained out intentionally, it's not exactly fun to look at. There's also a distinct distance created with all of the characters, like Boorman was trying to apply the minimal dialogue from the hyper-focused Hell in the Pacific to a story with more characters and more ideas floating around, and it largely keeps the audience outside of the action as observers instead of finding anyone to actually latch onto.
Essentially, Leo the Last feels like a series of miscalculations from its inception. Boorman was still a talented filmmaker, but it seems obvious that he needed some level of structure around him to operate effectively. Thinking ahead to Exorcist II: The Heretic, another film where Boorman had more total control, and it's just another film with a host of ideas that clash with each other while the actual storytelling becomes secondary and difficult to sit through. The saving grace of this film, if it has one, is the comedy which is often fairly funny, but it's not nearly enough to save the film as a whole.
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