Lemon a Tempting Taste of Mubi’s Wares

Sometimes, what’s in your wallet has a way of defining your entertainment options.  When a pandemic further constrains where you can go for a little relaxing stimulation, opportunities nowadays often take on a virtual dimension. 

Based on a recent foray into Mubi, a movie streaming service that’s built a large and loyal following in the five years it’s been in business, the diversity of the company’s eclectic portfolio may strike a receptive chord for many of us looking to expand our choices.  The platform introduces a new movie every day and leaves it up for 30 days before removing it from rotation.  Considered a cinematic repertory, their film line-up includes old movies, foreign language films and movies that could be thought of as challenging and provocative as well as interesting.

Lemon certainly falls into this camp.   Directed by Panamanian born Janicza Bravo, and co-written with her spouse and the movie’s star, Brett Gelman, Lemon can leave you scratching your head as well as smiling wryly at its approach, message and impact. 

Gelman plays Isaac, a guy who seems out of tune and out of step with a world that, socially, is slowly be disintegrating around him. At one time, he was a promising actor in New York.  When we meet him, those years must have been a long time ago.  Now, middle aged and a mean theater director overseeing a warped interpretation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, he’s living in L.A. with his blind girlfriend of ten years, Ramona (Judy Greer).  She’s about to leave him.  There are no smiles in their relationship.  As a matter of fact, Isaac rarely smiles and seems to deadpan his way through a lot of his life with a look that seems always on the verge of a hard scowl.  When he’s not being inscrutable, he’s either being venomously caustic to the female lead in the play he’s directing or maliciously scheming.

You’ll be left to draw your own conclusions about how Lemon got its name.  Critics who didn’t care for the movie when it was released in 2017 simply considered it truth in advertising.  The name could apply to Isaac as well. Throughout the film, he registers no interest in redeeming himself and seems to learn nothing from his repeated gaffs and failures.  That inability is one of the things that make you keep watching this comedy that’s could just as easily pass as something closer to human tragedy.  You’re hoping Isaac will eventually wake up and see how he’s hurting himself by his own blindness.  In the meantime, you watch how Isaac being Isaac is affecting everyone else who comes into his orbit. 

This is where Bravo’s unique directorial art comes into focus and becomes such a signature part of the film.  She takes the conventional and alters how we see it by adding a low voltage intensity that viscerally connects to her audience. There’s a rightness that she gets about our interactions with one another.  The way Ramona recoils so instinctively from Isaac’s touch is both comic and full of pathos.  When he visits his family for a high Jewish holiday, there’s the usual angst that slips into many families when they get together.  Despite a rousing and joyful all hands-on deck rendition of A Million Matzah Balls, it’s the unspoken despair that pervades and settles over the celebration that lingers. 

Lemon also seems to toy with the way race weaves through American culture.  After his girlfriend finally tells him she’s leaving, Isaac goes into saving face mode by trying to have a relationship with, well, just about anybody; including the male lead in his play.  It’s not just that the whole thing predictably implodes, it’s the way Isaac retaliates against this man even before he tries to make his move that’s so onerous.  He has well entrenched and deeply negative opinions about black people; but that doesn’t stop him from trying to date Cleo (Nia Long), a black woman working on the set of a gig his agent helped him snag.  When he’s invited to her family’s BBQ, his comments, reeking of veiled bias, were generally ignored. Earlier, the way his young nieces taunt their adopted black cousin felt like the kind of insistent bigotry that would be quite at home in Bull Connor’s Alabama. Expressed by children only added to its vileness.   

Certainly, a conversation with Bravo and Gelman would uncover their intentions for inserting these charged race centered vignettes into their story.  Without that knowledge, all we’re left with is the way they affect us; unresolved and curious.  In a more positive way, it’s the same impression we’re left with regarding Mubi; with curiosity prevailing.  Other current titles on the streaming service include But I’m a Cheerleader featuring Netflix’s Russian Doll phenome, Natasha Lyonne.  The wealth of titles from each of the world’s continents hold real promise for uncovering a string of treasures.

Mubi’s $10.99 monthly subscription fee may well be worth it to you if you love cinema and appreciate the arthouse nature of the platform’s film archive.  Mubi is also available through Amazon Prime for $5.99.  The Amazon model does not include the Mubi Notebook or Mubi Feed and the cost is in addition to standard Amazon Prime fees. 

Greg Threze