Bryan Miller
Few things can make you feel quite so old and also quite so near to your youth as a coming of age film like Chris Merola’s debut feature, Lemonade Blessing, Recently screened at the Twin Cities Film Festival. The particulars can be alienating — kids these days are sexually fixated on characters from cut scenes of some indecipherable video game?! Get offa my lawn! — but the emotional underpinnings are timeless. It’s a genre that tends to be every bit as formulaic as the romantic comedy, but that repetitiveness isn’t so much a lack of imagination as it is a pronouncement of universality.
The devil is in the details, of course, and for John Santucci (Jake Ryan), the young protagonist of Lemonade Blessing, the devil is potentially everywhere. His devoutly religious mother, Mary (Jeanine Serralles), has enrolled him in a Catholic high school run by an iron-fisted matron who makes R. Lee Ermy look like Jesus H. Christ handing out free bread. She’s eager for John to get more involved in the church, and he is too, or at least he thinks he might be, torn as he is between his overbearing mother’s faith and his dirtbag father’s moral incuriousness.
Trouble is, he’s smitten with his new classmate Lilith (Skye Alyssa Friedman), a would-be hellion in nerdy schoolgirl’s clothing who is eagerly testing out the boundaries of her own militant atheism. She definitely likes John, or at least she likes that she can coerce him into performing various acts of sacrilege in exchange for adolescent sexual favors. Pour holy water in a dog’s bowl? We can kiss on the back of the bus. Burn a bible? Maybe second base.
Lemonade Blessing’s provocations are genuinely provocative, particularly for the deistically inclined, but it’s far too empathetic to register as anything other than sweet. John might have the narrow perspective that is the cause of so much teenage selfishness, but Merola has an expansive understanding of the supporting characters. That’s particularly true of John’s mother, Mary, whose internal conflicts are especially well observed in her scene with the hard-nosed school principal. As Serralles plays it, you can see the flicker of realization — Am I this hard on my own son? — which is quickly subsumed by the sense of shame caused by her own divorced. It’s a harsh but not mean-spirited evocation of the generational cycle of religious guilt.
Star Jake Ryan is young, but he’s practically an old veteran of coming of age movies, having appeared in Moonrise Kingdom and played a significant role in Bo Burnham’s devastating Eighth Grade. He’s appeared in two other Wes Anderson movies, which makes sense; it’s hard not to think of Jason Schwartzman when you see Ryan in his crested school uniform jacket, much the same way Schwartzman in Rushmore sometimes called to mind a young Dustin Hoffman — another example of the way things stay the same even as they change
Ryan gets his shot as the lead in one of these films, and he’s terrific. The big discovery, though, is newcomer Friedman. This is her first feature film, and she’s remarkable. She leans hard into Lilith’s antagonism, but any filmgoer with more life experience than poor, naive John can see that her facade of wickedness is a shield for her own vulnerability. Friedman plays the contrasting elements of her character beautifully as both a dream girl and a nightmare — and, of course, just a confused kid herself.
The least interesting form of film criticism is to say what a movie should have been like or how a story could have gone a different way. But it’s hard not to wish there was a slightly more equitable share of focus between Lilith and John, in part because Merola has written a compelling character, but mostly because you just want more time with such an intriguing new screen presence. If there’s any justice in Hollywood — hey, don’t laugh — Friedman will soon have a résumé as robust as Ryan’s, and both young performers continue to raise their profiles. Merola does right by his young stars in this nicely grounded comedy, although parts this good in movies this honest aren’t so easy to come by.
