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Film Review: Life's Astringent Taste Can Go Down Smooth

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  • Film Review: Life's Astringent Taste Can Go Down Smooth

    New York Times
    April 1 2004


    Life's Astringent Taste Can Go Down Smooth
    By ELVIS MITCHELL


    "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, which will be shown tonight, tomorrow and Saturday as
    part of the New Directors/New Films series, starts with an old man
    being pulled across the snowy wastes on his bed, an image right out
    of a dream. But Mr. 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, Mr.
    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. Mr.
    Saleem understands that need is the central motivating force in the
    villagers' lives: for heat, food, emotional humidity and clarity.

    Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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.

    VODKA LEMON

    Directed by Hiner Saleem; written (in Armenian, Kurdish and Russian,
    with English subtitles) by Beatrice Pollet; director of photography,
    Christophe Pollock; edited by Theodora Mantzouru; music by Michel
    Korb; production designer, Albert Hamarash; produced by Fabrice Guez.
    Running time: 88 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown with a
    six-minute short, David Licata's "Tango Octagenario" tonight at 6 and
    tomorrow night at 8:30 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center,
    165 West 65th Street, and Saturday at 9 p.m. at the MoMA Gramercy
    Theater, 127 East 23rd Street, Manhattan, as part of the 33rd New
    Directors/New Films series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and
    the department of film and media of the Museum of Modern Art.

    WITH: Romik Avinian (Hamo), Ivan Franek (Dilovan), Zaal Karielachvili
    (Giano), Lala Sarkissian (Nina), Armen Maroutyan (Romik), Astrik
    Avaguian (Avin), Rouzana-Vite Mesropian (Zine), Témou (Azad) and
    Armen Sarkissyan (Bus Driver).
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