52 Films by Women Vol 3. 15. LEMONADE (Director: Ioana Uricaru)
‘If life gives you lemons, make
lemonade’ – proverb.
‘I’m a secret lemonade drinker –
R White’s, R White’s’ – popular ad.
For many, migrating to America is
a life’s dream. You escape poverty and oppression in your own country to avail
yourself of the opportunities that the United States has to offer. You could
join a band and secure a record deal, audition for a Hollywood movie and get
the part, or you could work on a food truck. In popular mythology, if not in
life, you can remake yourself, be a version 2.0. Of course, a lot of people
love the classics; in The Odyssey,
the hero of the nimble wits comes home.
Lemonade is a film about
the terror of being undocumented. Its hero, Mara (Mãlina Manovici) is a nurse
who came to the US on a special programme. She treated and later married one of
her patients, Daniel (Dylan Scott Smith), who had an accident at work, falling
from a tree - though not like the proverbial apple. (Daniel is variously
described as a landscapist and a lumberjack.) As any husband would do, Daniel
is helping his wife get a Green Card, that is, the right to be an American
citizen. Mara has also invited Dragos (Milan Hurduc), her nine-year-old son
from a failed relationship, to live with them. This throws Daniel out quite a
bit as Mara sleeps with her boy and not her man. Moji (Steve Bacic), the
immigration officer assigned to her case, is naturally sceptical. Whilst
waiting for her interview, Mara puts cotton wool in her ears to protect her
throat from the air conditioning. ‘There’s a connection,’ she explains, ‘the
trachea’ (otherwise known as the windpipe, it allows the passage of air to the
lungs, allowing a person to breathe). Moji ‘don’t know much about biology’, as
Sam Cooke’s popular song goes. He doesn’t even believe ‘what a wonderful world
this could be’. Rather, contriving an out-of-office meeting with Mara, he’d
rather that she would suck his – . I can imagine the out of office message –
now available to all #MeToo deniers.
Having established that Mara lied
in her interview about certain intimacy issues, an enraged Moji – or e-Moji for
short (couldn’t resist) – forces Mara to give him a hand job. Then he asks to
meet her at a motel on Friday, texting her the address. At this point, Mara
quite literally has Moji by the short and curlies. I don’t believe it is in the
Immigration Officer handbook that staff should text individuals under
consideration. Any decent lawyer would advise Mara of this. Unfortunately, Mara
doesn’t have access to a decent lawyer – just a Serbian guy who masqueraded as
a Bosnian to get his Golden Ticket to the US who advises her to record the
meeting.
There are other complications.
Leaving Dragos with her best friend, Aniko (Ruxandra Maniu) to meet Moji, Mara
returns to Aniko’s hotel room to find two police officers in attendance. The
following scene, filmed in a single take, took co-writer-director Ioana Uricaru and her cast 58 attempts
to get right – that’s one more than the number of Communists mentioned in The Manchurian Candidate. The two
officers ask Mara not to say anything to the child while they establish her
identity, it being illegal to leave a minor home alone. This scene stops the
movie in its tracks – it’s a sock to the trachea. Yet, it is very effective, if
belonging to a different movie than the one Uricaru has made.
The difficulty I have with Lemonade is that, just like Moji
himself, it doesn’t give its characters a fair hearing. The ‘child alone’ scene
succeeds because it explores the gap between procedure and humanity, how it is
not possible to assume that the person visiting a room in which a child is
locked is a responsible parent as opposed to, say, a kidnapper. When characters
are unambiguously abusive, like Moji himself, Uricaru loses the argument that
immigration systems should be better. The script was long in gestation – an
early title was ‘After the Wedding’, though it had already been used by Susanne
Bier. My title for the film would have been ‘Documentary Evidence’ about the
need to present a life to satisfy assessment in an age when everyone is
documenting. Too bad that I cannot sign up to be a Sundance script advisor.
Still, as we know from American
popular culture, even young girls can sell Lemonade, so it isn’t a terrible
title even if the singer Beyonce got there first. The drama really loses it
when Mara tells Daniel how she was mistreated by the immigration officer. He
explodes with rage, striking Mara and calling her a whore. At this point, I
knew Uricaru didn’t know that character. Yes, men do strike women and resort to
clichés. But at the end of the day, Mara treated him. Daniel married her based
on tender loving care and his desire to make amends for some wrong that caused
him to fall from a tree – he shouldn’t have branched out (boom, boom).
Characters should show different sides, but they deserve to be treated equally.
When writer-director John Sayles crafts a screenplay, he constructs a biography
for all of the characters, to help the cast to deliver truth on screen. Mike
Leigh does a similar thing, encouraging detailed improvisations prior to
filming in order that the actors can both build and know their characters.
Early scenes show an impulse towards reproducing reality, as if when Mara
receives inoculations in the opening scene – she receives one more jab that she
signed up for and vomits in Daniel’s car (truly a test of any relationship). I
honestly believe that Uricaru had a list of scenes that she wanted to include,
no matter what, but then narrative got in the way.
Lemonade doesn’t deliver truth, rather plot. I believe that it is
Uricaru’s exposure to American bad habits that drives the film into clichés. By
the end, we see characters move into a new space. I didn’t see the
computer-generated shadow of a bird flying away, symbolising liberation, but
even if I had, I wouldn’t have believed it. Directors, if they want to deliver
authenticity, should listen to themselves and not a bunch of pseudo-script
doctors.
Reviewed at Berlinale 2018, Cine Star Screen 3, Friday 23 February
2018, 17:45 screening, in the presence of the director
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