A scene from Dear Lemon Lima. This coming-of-age movie may be no lemon but it raises questions about indigenous authenticity.
By Ed Rampell
Suzi Yoonessi’s Dear Lemon Lima, which is nominated for the Los Angeles Film Festival’s $50,000 Narrative Competition prize, is a heartfelt bittersweet coming-of-age story set in Fairbanks, Alaska.
The protagonist is a rarity in contemporary cinema: Vanessa Lemor is a part Yup’ik 13-year-old girl poignantly and playfully portrayed by Savanah Wiltfong. Yup’iks are Alaskan Natives who are related to Inuits, and throughout Dear Lemon Lima indigenous culture is paid lip service by the prep school Vanessa attends as its sole scholarship student.
In the opening Vanessa rejects a backpack her indigenous grandmother has sent her for being “too ethnic,” and she moons after an all-American white boy, Philip (the appropriately smarmy, smug Shayne Topp). The fair-skinned Vanessa even dyes her hair blonde at one point, in order to fit in more with her mostly Caucasian private school peers and to attract Philip, who flirts with a stereotypical dumb blonde, Megan (Meaghan Jette Martin).
Despite her efforts to conform Vanessa is consigned to the academy’s group of misfits, the FUBARS. The social pariahs consist, at first, of what appears to be a darker skinned Native girl (or is she is Asian?) named Nothing Amigone (Maia Lee), whose parents run a funeral parlor, the Asian Chin Twins (Jada Morrison and Taylor Finlon) and Hercule Howard (Zane Huett), an overprotected, diminutive white lad. When the Nichols School participates in the World Eskimo Indian Olympics (WEIO is an actual sporting competition) the offbeat subject matter is offset by that standard predictable plot ploy of the outsiders surprising everybody (except viewers who have already seen movies like The Dirty Dozen and The Bad News Bears) by excelling and surpassing pat expectations.
There’s no doubt that Dear Lemon Lima, with its quirky animation and emotions worn on its sleeve, is a crowd pleaser, as well as a well-directed, affecting picture about adolescence. It is a sort of more lighthearted the 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut’s 1959 New Wave classic about troubled childhood) with a female touch. It doubtlessly deserves a wide audience, and, perhaps, LAFF’s Narrative Competition award. Writer-director Yoonessi said she wanted to make a film that promoted “love and kindness,” and she has richly succeeded in doing so. Yet the feature raises certain questions.
In the end, it is Vanessa’s knowledge of the Yup’ik culture she had earlier scorned that makes her a winner at the WEIO contest. As William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true.” However, it is the indigenous subject matter that’s so integral to Dear Lemon Lima that made the antennas of this film historian -- who has co-authored/authored three movie history books that deal with the topic of ethnic representation and misrepresentation onscreen – go up. There is a long tradition dating at least as far back as Robert Flaherty’s 1922 semi-documentary classic Nanook of the North and to Ray Mala’s 1932, Igloo, and 1933, Eskimo of Alaskan and North Pole, where tribal peoples are depicted on the silver screen. The actress who portrays Vanessa is, like her character, part Yup’ik. Writer-director Yoonessi, however, is an Iranian-American who does not seem to be especially knowledgeable about the culture she represents onscreen, although to be fair Yoonessi claims she did research aspects of the Alaskan Native way of life. But the biggest undercutting of the film’s pretensions of cultural authenticity and legitimacy is that it was shot not in the 49th State, but rather in Washington State (where she used actual Yup’ik dancers residing in the Evergreen State). When I asked Yoonessi why she used Washington to double as Alaska, her answer was basically because of the former’s “tax incentives.” Apparently Gov. Sarah Palin was too busy shopping 'till she dropped for haute couture, shooting moose and feuding with David Letterman to try and lure filmmakers to America’s largest – and arguably wildest – state to make movies.
Be that as it may, money trumped cultural integrity, and as one who has never been to Alaska my sense of Dear Lemon Lima providing a window into that far away place and its remote people was diminished by its inauthentic locations. I guess if you’ve seen one northwestern state, you’ve seen them all. Did the filmmakers, like Vanessa’s prep school, merely pay lip service to indigenous culture? I would have liked to see what contemporary Alaska is really like with a film actually shot on location there. Nevertheless, Dear Lemon Lima remains well worth seeing and this audience pleasing dramedy has deservedly secured a third LAFF screening Junr 27, 4:15 pm., at the Landmark Theatre.
In the opening Vanessa rejects a backpack her indigenous grandmother has sent her for being “too ethnic,” and she moons after an all-American white boy, Philip (the appropriately smarmy, smug Shayne Topp). The fair-skinned Vanessa even dyes her hair blonde at one point, in order to fit in more with her mostly Caucasian private school peers and to attract Philip, who flirts with a stereotypical dumb blonde, Megan (Meaghan Jette Martin).
Despite her efforts to conform Vanessa is consigned to the academy’s group of misfits, the FUBARS. The social pariahs consist, at first, of what appears to be a darker skinned Native girl (or is she is Asian?) named Nothing Amigone (Maia Lee), whose parents run a funeral parlor, the Asian Chin Twins (Jada Morrison and Taylor Finlon) and Hercule Howard (Zane Huett), an overprotected, diminutive white lad. When the Nichols School participates in the World Eskimo Indian Olympics (WEIO is an actual sporting competition) the offbeat subject matter is offset by that standard predictable plot ploy of the outsiders surprising everybody (except viewers who have already seen movies like The Dirty Dozen and The Bad News Bears) by excelling and surpassing pat expectations.
There’s no doubt that Dear Lemon Lima, with its quirky animation and emotions worn on its sleeve, is a crowd pleaser, as well as a well-directed, affecting picture about adolescence. It is a sort of more lighthearted the 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut’s 1959 New Wave classic about troubled childhood) with a female touch. It doubtlessly deserves a wide audience, and, perhaps, LAFF’s Narrative Competition award. Writer-director Yoonessi said she wanted to make a film that promoted “love and kindness,” and she has richly succeeded in doing so. Yet the feature raises certain questions.
In the end, it is Vanessa’s knowledge of the Yup’ik culture she had earlier scorned that makes her a winner at the WEIO contest. As William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true.” However, it is the indigenous subject matter that’s so integral to Dear Lemon Lima that made the antennas of this film historian -- who has co-authored/authored three movie history books that deal with the topic of ethnic representation and misrepresentation onscreen – go up. There is a long tradition dating at least as far back as Robert Flaherty’s 1922 semi-documentary classic Nanook of the North and to Ray Mala’s 1932, Igloo, and 1933, Eskimo of Alaskan and North Pole, where tribal peoples are depicted on the silver screen. The actress who portrays Vanessa is, like her character, part Yup’ik. Writer-director Yoonessi, however, is an Iranian-American who does not seem to be especially knowledgeable about the culture she represents onscreen, although to be fair Yoonessi claims she did research aspects of the Alaskan Native way of life. But the biggest undercutting of the film’s pretensions of cultural authenticity and legitimacy is that it was shot not in the 49th State, but rather in Washington State (where she used actual Yup’ik dancers residing in the Evergreen State). When I asked Yoonessi why she used Washington to double as Alaska, her answer was basically because of the former’s “tax incentives.” Apparently Gov. Sarah Palin was too busy shopping 'till she dropped for haute couture, shooting moose and feuding with David Letterman to try and lure filmmakers to America’s largest – and arguably wildest – state to make movies.
Be that as it may, money trumped cultural integrity, and as one who has never been to Alaska my sense of Dear Lemon Lima providing a window into that far away place and its remote people was diminished by its inauthentic locations. I guess if you’ve seen one northwestern state, you’ve seen them all. Did the filmmakers, like Vanessa’s prep school, merely pay lip service to indigenous culture? I would have liked to see what contemporary Alaska is really like with a film actually shot on location there. Nevertheless, Dear Lemon Lima remains well worth seeing and this audience pleasing dramedy has deservedly secured a third LAFF screening Junr 27, 4:15 pm., at the Landmark Theatre.
