Janicza Bravo's first feature film, Lemon, goes over the top
If there is a common theme to most indie movies, and it might be hard to argue that there is, that theme could conceivably be that people are strange.
As much as we look to our commonalities to understand each other as people, the diversity of humanity is often times mind-boggling. We like to describe unique people as one in a million, but with billions of people worldwide, being one in a million is really very common.
The truth is more complex. People might be similar, but the diversity of human experience means that no one is just like anyone else. Some people, in fact, are so dissimilar from anyone else that they are nearly unrecognizable. Many indie movies, through exaggeration and surrealism, highlight this fact.
Lemon, the first feature film by Janicza Bravo, is an exploration of the strange behavior of a man who recently lost his girlfriend. In what could have been a simple story of a breakup, Bravo chooses to focus on exaggerating the traits and backgrounds of her characters, poking fun at self-perception and serious people, dragging stereotypes of all kinds into the light, pushing and pulling the audiences into a variety of uncomfortable situations, then forcing them to examine their reactions.
The title of the film refers to the type of car that just never runs correctly. The ones that are always low on oil, have quirky transmissions, or have a hard time turning right. It’s a poor buy and poor decision, one that floods the owner with frustration and angst.
Isaac (Brett Gelman) is a lemon. He’s an acting teacher and mediocre commercial actor in L.A that passes harsh judgement on his students to make up for a lost career in New York. We watch him heap criticism on one student while lavishing praise on another, pitting them against each other for reasons that are obvious to no one but him. His praise only goes so far, however.
When his prize student Alex (Michael Cera) lands a successful role in a film, Isaac rewards him by spray-painting a racial slur on his car. Ultimately, the film is about Isaac’s unravelling after Ramona (Judy Greer), his girlfriend of ten years, leaves him. How she managed ten years with the man seems miraculous. At any rate, it causes Isaac to spiral into a more unstable version of himself.
We watch as he endures a Passover celebration with his family, each character as weird and uncompromising as Isaac himself. We watch him seek solace in the eyes of another only to find he lacks any ability to connect because he doesn’t understand himself.
The film has an exceptional cast, from Rhea Pearlman to Megan Mullally to Jeff Garlin to Martin Starr to dozens of familiar and welcome faces in between. It’s a feature film featuring character actors, who are given plenty of meat to work with and scenery to chew.
The film is lacking an everyman character, a person for the audience to connect with, our eyes and ears of every day interaction, a person that can stand in for us and diffuse the awkwardness unfolding onscreen.
Bravo wants that everyman character to be the audience itself. It is unflinching and forces us to absorb everything that happens onscreen and deal with it in our own way. For that reason, the film is somewhat exhausting.
While the running time is only an hour and half, the film feels longer because it never really gives us a chance to escape from Isaac and his increasingly poor decision-making. When he turns his affections on Cleo, the only somewhat normal character in the film, it’s hard to understand why she continues spending time with him. It makes you wonder how someone can be that nice.
But then this isn’t a film for rational thought and action. As I said, the film is an exaggeration. There aren’t many people in the world like Isaac or Alex, at least not in full. There are shades of these characters found in parts of the artistic world, but these shades don’t make up the whole character.
I suppose Bravo is exploring what the world would be like if these characters existed as they do in the film—how would the world react to them? Can you do more than bitterly laugh? There’s a lot of sad chuckling to be done when watching Lemon. There’s not much else to do.
Lemon
Opens this Friday
See website for showtimes
Palace Picture House
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