The Daily Star, Lebanon
Sept 25 2004
Late 20th century life gets a twist of ‘Vodka Lemon’
Iraqi Kurd’s tragicomic film about post-communist Armenia is a
highlight of the Cinema Days festival
By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
BEIRUT: Hinner Salim’s “Vodka Lemon” opens with an old man in bed. A
car is dragging him, bed and all, along a snow-covered road. He
arrives at his destination, the graveyard, solemnly removes both
racks of false teeth and begins to play the doudouk – the beautifully
mournful pipe that is probably Armenia’s best-known export, aside
from the Armenians themselves. The old fellow is one of a band of
musicians summoned to perform for somebody else’s funeral.
It is one of those moments that audiences have learned to expect of
films emerging from the once-communist world. Gypsy brass bands run
behind speeding cars while they play (alternatively having money
thrown and bullets fired at them), a la Emir Kusturica’s
“Underground.” Cows inexplicably fall from the sky to kill
bridegrooms, as in Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov’s “Luna Papa.” These
bizarre, funny, poetic conjurings serve as brilliant metaphors for
the tragicomic dislocations of the late 20th century.
There are a number of such moments in “Vodka Lemon,” one of the
non-Arab “guest films” at the Ayam Beirut Cinemaiyya (Cinema Days)
film festival which ends Sunday. Salim’s skill in using them renders
his story – which is pretty damn depressing in itself – all the more
entertaining and artful.
Set in a bleak, snowbound Armenian village, the story revolves around
Hamo (Romik Avinian) and Nina (Lala Sarkissian) and the snowbound
graveyard they visit every day. Hamo’s wife died some years earlier,
leaving him a trio of grown sons. The oldest, Dilovan (Ivan Franek),
lives poorly in the same village as Hamo, another works in Russia,
the youngest, Robert, has emigrated to the good life in Paris.
The arrival of the youngest son’s letters sends Hamo to Yerevan
periodically, in hopes the boy is sending money. Salim wrings some
great comedy out of Hamo’s plight. Upon his first return from
Yerevan, his son, then the other men of the village materialize on
his doorstep looking for handouts. None of them believe that there
was no money enclosed, so he has to show them the letter and the
photo of his son happily hugging his French girlfriend.
Money, or the lack of it, nudges the plot forward. The village is
becalmed, stuck in the doldrums of economic transition. The communist
economy has evaporated, and with it the provision of basic
essentials. Consumer capitalism – or rather the jobs that make
consumer capitalism “work” – has yet to arrive. With no visible means
of income aside from sheep-rearing and sales of the local tipple (the
ubiquitous, almond-flavoured “Vodka Lemon”), the locals have been
forced to start selling their meager possessions. The images of
people staggering along desolate roadways lugging pieces of furniture
on their backs would be utterly depressing were they not so absurdly
funny.
Nina is also next to penniless. Her husband, a fighter of some
description, has been dead for a decade, leaving her with a pair of
daughters. One of them has made it safely outside the village. Nina
explains to Hamo that the other daughter, a musician, plays piano in
a hotel but that her only source of income are “tips” from her
“admirers.” As we later see, in post-communist Armenia personal
possessions aren’t the only things people are forced to put a price
on.
When Hamo’s granddaughter becomes pregnant by one of the local men
who’s made good in capitalist Russia, Hamo, his son and the young
man’s father negotiate a marriage. Hamo’s son remarks that his
daughter is no whore, yet we later learn that the fee for the
“marriage contract” – the price of his daughter’s virginity – is
$2,000 and a job for him in Russia. When his son-in-law can’t furnish
the fee, the father-in-law shoots him.
Though he carries a gun and, like so many of the men in the film,
looks a bit of a thug, Hamo’s son isn’t particularly villainous. He’s
just desperate for want of money. The film lingers over the
implication that in circumstances where everything has a price –
which, with greater or lesser degrees of overt violence, are the
circumstances everywhere – human dignity goes out the window. Many a
devastatingly bleak film has worked with this very theme, in fact.
Salim, however, resists the temptation.
This may have something to do with the fact that – if the press is to
be believed – Hinner Salim is relatively new to film. Like Iranian
director Abbas Kiarostami, this native of Iraqi Kurdistan is known as
a poet and painter. It is tempting to compare Salim’s pacing, and his
remarkable use of landscape, with that of Kiarostami, but the
comparison wouldn’t do justice to the subtle emotion and wry humour
that are central to “Vodka Lemon.”
Hamo and Nina strike up a friendship while visiting their respective
graves. When she’s not on the bus one day – she can’t pay the $5 in
accumulated fares she owes the bus driver – Hamo pays her bill,
though he’s been selling his possessions at the open market. Nina
later loses her job at the Vodka Lemon kiosk – the owner complains
that the location’s not making him any money – at the same time that
her daughter loses her meal ticket. Destitute, she calls upon Hamo to
give her a hand, moving her only valued possession – an out-of-tune
piano that her daughter uses to practice.
They move it to the roadside, but Salim lets the couple find another
use for the instrument, one that – if fantastical, in the tradition
of magic realism – reaffirms and reinforces the dignity of his
characters rather than utterly extinguishing it. Though set in
Armenia, Hinner Salim’s film takes his audience on a stroll through a
compact metaphor for the human condition at the beginning of the 21st
century. Remarkably enough, he leaves us smiling.
Hinner Salim’s “Vodka Lemon,” the closing film of Ayam Beirut
Cinemaiyya Film Festival, will screen at Beirut’s Cinema Sofil on
Sunday, 26 September, at 8.30pm