‘Vodka Lemon’ Life’s astringent taste can go down smooth
By Elvis Mitchell New York Times
Times Argus
March 22, 2005
“Vodka Lemon” just might be the world’s iciest postcard film: You
will never be so happy to sit inside a cozy, theater as when you
watch the actors exhaling clouds of warm breath over the blindingly
white expanse.
But the thicket of relationships that the director, Hiner Saleem,
has created and weaves his cast and camera through is so invitingly
hotblooded and crowded with hilariously melodramatic incident
that the snowbanks are not nearly as forbidding as they initially
seem. Eventually the chilly air becomes a character; it has the
astringent sharpness of the title drink that everyone in the movie
downs, and complains about.
The picture starts with an old man being pulled across the snowy
wastes on his bed, an image right out of a dream. But Saleem’s gifts
come from giving these outlandish visual statements a grounding in
the everyday reality that the characters experience. He is headed to
a funeral, and “Vodka Lemon” charts the intermingling – marriages,
death and sexual complications – in an Armenian village. Like most of
the other New Directors/New Films offerings “Vodka Lemon” is set in
a place that almost makes us want to applaud for the sheer industry
required to get a camera crew there.
Chief among the citizens is the wily Hamo, played by Romik
Avinian. With a grizzled jaw line one could scratch to start a
fire, Avinian dominates the picture as if he has finally grown
into his surly, direct charisma. This fine, guarded actor anchors
the goings-on. After attending so many funerals, Hamo has begun a
flirtation with a much younger woman, the 50-ish widow Nina (Lala
Sarkissian). She feels a void in her life, and he simply recognizes
now as the time for both of them to move into a new adventure.
The ravaged and impoverished village also must cope with its own
deficits. The support system in place during Soviet rule is long gone,
with several residents fondly griping about the comforts, such as
they were, that the Soviets provided. There hasn’t been much change;
life in this flash-frozen community has gone from minimal to Spartan,
but nostalgie de la boue is still nostalgia.
“We have nothing left but our freedom,” one villager grouses. Saleem
understands that need is the central motivating force in the villagers’
lives: for heat, food, emotional humidity and clarity.
Saleem’s layering does compensate for the lack of formal structure,
though the picture is provisionally set around the shock waves caused
by the imminent wedding of Nina’s granddaughter. But the picture
does not need an elaborately contrived plot. What it has instead
is a neighborly, fresh-air quality; all the doors in the miniature
snow-globe of a town are open, as is the chatter and curiosity about
everyone’s familial intrigues.
The movement from one conversation to another gives a likable freedom
to “Vodka Lemon,” and allows Saleem to set up a few running jokes
that combine quotidian absurdity with thoughtful melodrama, like the
opening shot of the old man, and a few other freakish outbursts that
have to be witnessed to be believed, and savored.
It is an intelligent gamble on Saleem’s part; he knows that if he’s
not going to satisfy audiences with convention, he should at least
supply a few entrances as detonation devices.
“Vodka Lemon” could be an Ice Capades version of a Beckett play,
with a group of seasoned though modest hammy actors in complete
control. Their affectlessness gives the movie an atmosphere of
hypothermia-laced surrealism, with shots of drama serving the same
purpose as the vodka; both keep the blood flowing. This movie has
an antic, mordant visual poetry that matches up with the rancor and
feeling in its population’s souls.