a review of 柠檬

MANNVANUARY FOUR: As much as I enjoyed the absolute fever-dream insanity of Bravo's second film ZOLA, and appreciate her directorial eye here, I'm compelled to wonder if maybe the thing holding her back here was the Brett Gelman of it all? Gelman absolutely has a gift for writing and embodying a certain kind of oblivious male privilege, and I wonder if the not-this-fucking-guy persona might have played somewhat better in 2017 (contemporaneous reviews seem to indicate "no, it didn't"), but the self-mortification his character goes through here feels like it might be revealing in ways that he might not have wholly intended.