‘Vodka Lemon’: A Warm Glance at Life on the Rocks
By Ann Hornaday, Washington Post Staff Writer

Washington Post
Dec 24 2004

If “Vodka Lemon” conjures images of tonic cocktails served against a
sun-splashed backdrop, think again. This wry romantic comedy from
writer-director Hiner Saleem is set against a snowscape of such vast
desolation that it makes Monday’s cold snap seem like the doggiest
days of August.

Set in post-Soviet Armenia, “Vodka Lemon” dispenses with the usual
conventions of most holiday films at the multiplex. Indeed, it’s
amusing to imagine how this almost defiantly quirky film might be
pitched in the bowels of Culver City: “It’s a love story about people
who are poor, disenfranchised and almost completely without hope!
With a cast of complete unknowns! In Armenian!”

An old man has a strange way of going to a funeral in Hiner Saleem’s
quirky “Vodka Lemon.” (New Yorker Films)

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It also works, thanks in large part to those unknowns. Romen Avinian
plays a sixtyish widower named Hamo who lives in an impoverished
unnamed village with his alcoholic son and voluptuous granddaughter.
Playing a man whose haggard sense of defeat belies still robust
appetites, Avinian provides the ballast in an ensemble cast playing a
motley crew of characters, villagers whose chronic shifts between
hope and resignation have congealed into a permanent state of
suspended animation.

The good news is that they’re free of the Russian boot, which is
precisely the bad news: Without state subsidies, these scrappy
survivors must now carve a precarious existence out of anything at
hand — selling their own meager belongings on the gray market (“Does
it work or does it really work?” a buyer asks Hamo about a television
that really doesn’t), or providing the local aperitif of choice at
the open-air outpost from which the movie takes its title.

That rickety boite’s shy, shivering barkeep would be Nina (Lala
Sarkissian), a middle-aged beauty whom Hamo meets at the cemetery
where both come to visit their late spouses’ graves. Saleem takes his
time getting the two together; first he puts them in any number of
absurdist vignettes designed to convey both the bleakness of the
Armenians’ lot and the tough humor with which they confront it. These
scenes are sometimes orchestrated with a self-consciousness that’s a
bit too precious (Saleem, an exiled Iraqi Turk, started out as a
painter and poet, and it shows). But many of them have the
existential whimsy of Ionesco. (Indeed, one of the film’s visual
leitmotifs recalls Ionesco’s play “The Chairs”; this is a village
where nearly everyone carries his or her own, whether to plop down
for an impromptu drink or, more likely, wait for a bus that always
arrives, eventually.)

The sense of unrequited anticipation is finally resolved in an
improbably lush love scene set — where else? — on that very bus.
Saleem is too unsentimental to linger there for long; soon Hamo and
Nina are trudging through those same impenetrable snowdrifts. But
he’s just romantic enough to end “Vodka Lemon” on an impossibly
hopeful note — and on the cusp of what looks suspiciously like an
impending thaw.

Vodka Lemon (88 minutes, in Armenian, Russian and Kurdish with
English subtitles, at Landmark’s E Street Cinema) is not rated.

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