The Times (London)
September 23, 2004, Thursday

A warmly surreal love story set in a post-Soviet village pleases
Wendy Ide

by Wendy Ide

VODKA LEMON. PG, 89 mins ***
SAVE THE GREEN PLANET. 18, 116 mins **
SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE. 18, 85 mins **
RED LIGHTS. 15, 105 mins ***
THE ISTER. N/C, 190 mins *

There is a tendency for films such as the Kurdish Armenian Vodka
Lemon to be dismissed as little more than a glorified ethnographic
show-and-tell, a charming novelty in elk-fur peasant garb. The Story
of the Weeping Camel from Mongolia suffered this fate at the hands of
some British critics earlier this year. The problem is that the
attitude directed towards films from small, poor, less newsworthy
countries can be rather patronising.

In fact, films from countries without a developed film-making
infrastructure can be far more interesting than those with a weighty
cinema history that dictates how and how not to make films.

Vodka Lemon merrily makes its own narrative rules, layering
colourfully surreal vignettes (there’s a definite flavour of Emir
Kusterica’s anarchic Gypsy communities) and bittersweet Armenian
in-jokes with a gentle, rather lovely autumn romance between a
widowed former army officer and the woman he glimpses each day at the
frost-bound cemetery.

The story is set in a Kurdish mountain village that is still
suffering the transition from Soviet occupation to free market. Of
course, a free market works only if you have money to buy things, and
the villagers are forced to barter their remaining sticks of
furniture and hope for an envelope filled with cash from the one
village son who made it to the West. It’s not nearly as bleak as it
sounds – there’s a specific kind of humour that thrives in the face
of extreme privation and Vodka Lemon has it in spades.

Another week, another piece of graphic Korean nastiness. At the heart
of Save the Green Planet (pictured above) is an interesting premise
-a businessman is kidnapped by a dangerous young criminal, but
instead of a ransom, the kidnapper wants an admission that the
businessman is in fact an alien from Andromeda, and that a visit from
an extraterrestrial prince is imminent.

It’s shot with a macabre visual elan and snappily edited, but the
extended torture sequences try the endurance and sit uncomfortably
with the rather juvenile tone of the film. Another problem is that
the writer-director, Jang Jun Hwan, doesn’t seem to know how to end
his film. It drags on for a good 30 minutes longer than it needs to,
bolstered by a montage of humanity’s worst atrocities -somewhat
disingenuous in a film that presents torture as entertainment.

More gore, this time from France, in the strangely titled Switchblade
Romance.

This is an old-school horror flick, in the sense that the gouging and
slashing and bludgeoning with barbed-wire wrapped cudgels is not
mitigated with humour, postmodern self-awareness or pop-cultural
references.

Die-hard horror aficionados will probably consider this a return to a
purist slasher-movie ethos. More sensitive souls will have a hard
time coping with its unremitting grisliness. There’s a strong central
performance, however, from the rising star Cecile De France, last
seen in the lamentable Around the World in Eighty Days. If only she
had wielded her barbed-wire cudgel where it was really needed.

Cedric Kahn’s latest film, Red Lights, is adapted from a novel that
Georges Simenon wrote in the 1950s. It was thematically ahead of its
time -Kahn (see interview, page 6) has moved this exploration of male
status anxiety to the present day and it works well.

An excellent performance from Jean-Pierre Darroussin is the driving
force in what could be described as a psychological drama, a road
movie and a thriller. He plays a rather pathetic little man whose ego
won’t let him accept the fact that he is an unremarkable accountant
while his wife (an icily indifferent Carole Bouquet) is a high-flying
lawyer.

This anger festers during a long, night-time car journey and he
sneaks illicit drinks along the way as small acts of rebellion. After
a confrontation, she decides to proceed alone and the night becomes a
darker and more dangerous place for both of them.

It’s hard to imagine a more specialist-interest film than The Ister,
a three hour documentary that riffs on a series of lectures delivered
by the philosopher Heidegger in 1942. And I’m afraid I lost interest
in this terminally dull film pretty quickly.

For this to succeed, it would need to be both visually striking and
accessible.

The Ister fails on both counts.