So often the problem with quirk is not the quirk itself, but the fact that the quirk is alloyed with sentimentality, and the resulting whimsy becomes just too cute to bear. So Janicza Bravo‘s directorial debut, which premiered in Sundance before opening the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, is to be congratulated for avoiding that pitfall by quite some distance: it quirks hard for its money, but its tone is sourer than the eponymous citrus fruit. That is, however, also its biggest issue: with a collection of offbeat but also pompous, self-centered, self-loathing, obscurely motivated, maladroit friends and relatives trading deadpan non-sequiturs with a deeply unprepossessing central character, the film needs to make up in wicked insight what it lacks in likability. But “Lemon” is too in love with being oddball to really have any connection to the real, non-quirky world. And so while scene-by scene its absurdism can be drolly amusing, it never coheres into anything more than a series of sketches depicting an awful person’s inability to navigate the world, bookended by literal toilet gags that, like the main character’s behavior, range from pissy to shitty.
Isaac (Brett Gelman, who also co-wrote the film with his wife Bravo, and so we can rest assured was complicit in the indignities and mortifications visited on his character) is a struggling actor and also an acting coach. Sporting the balding/bearded combo that is essentially indie movie shorthand for creepy and maladjusted, and a permanent expression of hangdog woundedness no matter that it’s usually him doing the wounding, he lives at home with his blind girlfriend Ramona (Judy Greer, frizzy) who leaves for long periods on slim pretexts and apparently can’t stand him touching her. Her blindness, incidentally — like his sister’s (Shiri Appelby) pregnancy, his family’s Jewishness and his love interest’s (Nia Long) Jamaican-American heritage — is more wacky attribute than condition or fundamental aspect of life.
In his acting class, he is workshopping Chekhov, and lavishes fawning, second-coming-of-Brando praise on Michael Cera‘s bizarrely-coiffed Alex, while constantly belittling his scene partner Tracy (Gillian Jacobs). His own acting career is foundering in a mire of incontinence commercials and Hep-C awareness campaigns but on one of these he meets make-up artist Cleo (Long), about whom he fantasizes when masturbating and whom, once Ramona leaves him for good, he asks out. Awkwardly, natch. For unexplained reasons, she agrees (Long does a good job with her essentially decent and sensible character, considering she’s the closest thing the film has to a straight man) and they go on a couple of terrible dates.
At moments, the film seems like it’s trying to do something interesting — that is, to add a dose of racial and ethnic color to the normally potato-puree-whiteness of the off-kilter, low-stakes indie dramedy genre. But the results are lopsided (Bravo does not take “Lemon” and make “Lemonade“): the Jewish family reunion is probably the most successful scene — not least because it gathers ringers like Fred Melamed, Rhea Perlman, Martin Starr and Appleby together and gives David Paymer the film’s one genuinely emotive speech. But the Jamaican extended-family barbecue to which Cleo invites Isaac, suffers from a lack of the kind of differentiating traits Isaac’s family are given. All the (white) people around Isaac either enable his weirdness or outdo it with their own neuroses, but Cleo and her hastily intro’d relatives respond to it as normal people would: with polite bafflement and not a little empathetic embarrassment. There is subversive potential to the idea of portraying your white characters as weirdos and your black characters as the audience proxies in this usually white-skewing genre, but here it happens too cursorily, and too late in the film, to really drive a strong point home.
For most of the time, we follow Isaac bumbling unsmilingly from one disaster of his own making to another, blurting out offensive remarks in the name of social ineptitude and generally failing in every sphere of life. He is essentially a Rick Alverson character trapped in a Quentin Dupieux movie but “Lemon” has neither the punishing self-awareness of the former nor the quasi-sci-fi surreality of the latter. Instead, all its oddness derives from characters who are designed to not behave in expected ways not behaving in expected ways, or from the stylized imagery, or from intriguingly jarring dangling edits (the film was cut by Joi McMillon, the Oscar-nominated co-editor of “Moonlight“) that leave long tracts of silence unbroken, only to cut questions off unanswered and swallow indeterminate gulps of time in an instant. On a craft level the film has much to recommend it, and Bravo is certainly one to watch in future: any one of the film’s “sketches” extended to feature length and really explored in a way that risks something more than its hapless central character’s dignity, might really be something. But this “Lemon,” though at pains to be astringently off-kilter, is so hermetically insulated from the real world that it might as well come vacuum-packed. [B-/C+]