It's enough to turn you to drink.
A bed slides along gaily in the snow like a troika. A woman's picture on a gravestone suddenly frowns disapprovingly. A piano goes spinning down the highway of its own accord. But why be
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surprised-we're in Armenia, and writer/director Hiner Saleem (
Beyond Our Dreams
) doesn't assume the usual laws of nature apply there. "If it's called Vodka Lemon, why does it taste like almonds?" grunts one of the characters, only to be met with a smile and shrug: "Don't ask questions-it's Armenia."
In a remote, snowbound post-Soviet village, courtly widower Hamo (Romen Avinian) visits his wife's grave daily to give her family updates. Not that there's much good news-their three deadbeat sons don't provide him with any income above his seven-dollar-a-day pension, and he's furtively selling off her few possessions one at a time to make ends meet. Another graveyard habitué, the womanly Nina (Lala Sarkissian), has even more dire financial problems-her talented, beautiful daughter claims she's working as a "hotel pianist," while Nina's own job selling vodka isn't terribly secure. In the midst of subsistence-level grimness, in a country where basic infrastructure can't be relied upon and traditional polite bargaining is edged with desperation, a mysterious but graceful social code guides Hamo and Nina through their clumsily Chagall-esque courtship.
Contrapuntal to the human characters, wandering in and out of the camera frame are different interesting objects which almost become characters in their own right: an inordinately heavy wardrobe which has to be lugged to market; a huge battered Soviet bus; the hilariously repeated motif of a horse and rider galloping through scenes for no particular reason; an uncontrived pink plastic shopping bag scudding across the snow. And the snow itself begins to appear as a character, sometimes clumping and wet on a sunny day, sometimes just beginning to sift down, fine and needle-like in the dark. Long, static shots underscore the desolation of immense distances until you crave motion in that desert of ice, a wilderness tracked only by power lines and dotted with tiny blobs of humanity. Saleem's wide-angle shots of these vast Arctic-Circle vistas yield tiny visual harmonies and sparse moments of Eastern European magical realism.
Vodka Lemon
reveals itself very gradually, without apology. It has downcast eyes, a refreshing kind of peasant modesty after the spectacular Yankee bombardment in which we
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specialize over here. And its politics are similarly understated; noting ruefully that life after Soviet occupation features freedom but not much else, the Armenian characters accept without much fuss the brutal, subtly presented fact that the Russians are still the ones with money and status, the ones able to buy their daughters. Armenia quietly stands in for exiled Iraqi Kurd Saleem's own troubled country; using it as his canvas, he's created a film that is oppositional rather than accommodating.
Vodka Lemon
makes little attempt to translate its world to us, just as its black-garbed characters are a people of few words-so few that at times it becomes a silent film. But the silences are those just after someone has revealed a secret: pregnant, poignant. And the sound of blowing wind acts as soundtrack to long stretches without dialogue, until you begin to appreciate harsh, snow-blasted landscapes, and start hankering after that sharp watery shot of warm vodka.
