Catholicism and adolescence should, at least on paper, be natural bedfellows. One is a boundary-testing time of near-deranged horniness and rife with terrible decisions, whilst the other preaches the power of forgiveness and learning from such mistakes. Now, anyone who grew up catholic (or indeed, anyone at all given how much we go on about it) can tell you this isn’t the case in practice. A predilection for authoritarianism, with internalized shame its omnipresent police force, means it can have a brutalizing effect on emotional development. It’s this world that Chris Merola’s debut Lemonade Blessing drops us into, doing so with energy, style, and, more than anything, empathy.
John (Jake Ryan) is a teenage boy whose parents have just divorced, leaving him with his deeply religious and overbearing mother (Jeanine Serralles). Intent on keeping him on the straight and narrow, she sends him off to catholic school where, with his tucked-in shirt, oddly Hitler-esque haircut, and nervous disposition, he’s quickly embarrassing himself. Amidst this transition he meets Lilith (Skye Alyssa Friedman), a troublemaker who quickly captures his fascination, and, after he passes a sacrilegious dare, he has hers. Their relationship progresses, but the pressures of adolescence, faith, and the rising stakes of her — as John describes it — “demonic errands” begin to engulf him.
But if this setup — “good Christian boy must get sacrilegious with it in pursuit of the girl he fancies” — sounds like it could be a riff on the frat-boyish mode that dominated the high school film in the mid-to-late 2000s, from the opening moments it’s apparent Lemonade Blessing is intent on something else, felt from the first glimpse of its expertly judged cinematography. Merola and DP Harrison Kraft bring a visual style that’s clammy and tense, full of sweaty faces and acrid colour palettes, laser-like in how it captures the sickly claustrophobia of teenage years and your body changing under you.
The feeling extends to its tone as well. As much as it shares some of their DNA, this is not trading in the knockabout cuteness of Gregory’s Girl or the amiably off-beat vibe of Napoleon Dynamite (the two sacred texts in the English language gawky teen boy canon). Instead, it’s is far spikier in its relationship to its own genre, wilfully eschewing convention wherever possible. This is most clear in the film’s take on the religion that drives most of the its tension. In a more straightforward film, religion would stand as a non-specific catch all for the grown-up world, authority, The Man, and all that, but Merola does well to keep the material more essential than that, examining it with sensitivity and specificity. That is to say, there’s no Carrie’s mom, only people trying to do what they think is right, however misguided, but Merola also never allows the the film to skimp on detailing the cruelty of these power structures and their lasting damage.
A lot of this sensitivity is carried by Ryan at the film’s center. Primarily known for his role in Asteroid City, here he is liberated from Wes Anderson’s two acceptable acting styles of quirkily annoying or quirkily irritating, and he’s fantastic in these new clothes. He’s already a more authentic and flawed character than your average film nerd; stumbling but heartfelt, shy but sparky, and he powers Lemonade Blessing along brilliantly, particularly in its latter stages where he carries off some of the best limp mania since Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood. It’s this performance, along with the chemistry between him and Friedman (similarly good but with less to do), that gives the film its considerable heart. And thankfully, that doesn’t arrive via the foghorn-honking tone shifts favored by someone like Judd Apatow, instead arriving in the little flickers in the teens’ faces when they first hold hands, or the way the whole film bounds along like a giddy Labrador from their first meeting. Predictably for a debut feature, it’s not without nits to pick; the forced falling out of John’s friends that sparks the lurch into the third act feels bussed in from a far less interesting film, for instance. But beyond small missteps of this forgivable degree, Lemonade Blessing is a remarkably assured first film, one that foregoes the twee template that plagues so many such films and lands as a funny, thoughtful addition to the canon.
DIRECTOR: Chris Merola; CAST: Jake Ryan, Jeanine Serralles, Skye Alyssa Friedman, Miles J. Harvey; DISTRIBUTOR: Antenna Releasing; IN THEATERS: September 16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
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