The Evening Standard (London)
September 23, 2004
VODKA LEMON ***
CERT PG, 89 MINS
IF YOU have never seen an Armenian film, try Vodka Lemon. It is one
of those intriguing, small-scale efforts that comfortably outpaces
many grander, more expensive designs.
Set in an impoverished Kurdish-Armenian village, it follows an
elderly widower who takes the bus every day to visit his wife’s
grave. He talks to her, not always kindly. On the bus, too, is a
local widow who works at a small roadside stall selling a brand of
liquor called Vodka Lemon. A delicate romance is born.
But the film is also about the poverty of the villagers. Hiner
Saleem, the director, is unsentimental about them, allowing his film
to be funny without being patronising and to pass from realism into a
kind of fantasy during which the two lovers ride off into the sunset
on the old piano they are trying to sell. It’s an odd mixture which
makes Vodka Lemon particularly tasty.