You'd have to have a heart as cold as the landscape not to feel for the dreadful situation in which the characters in this film find themselves. They live in the snowy wastes of Armenia, deserted by the superpowers, struggling to eke out an existence through selling their old army uniforms, televisions, the vodka lemon of the title, and (in the case of the two young women) their bodies. Several of the key scenes in the film have the characters sat in the cold landscape, talking to their dead relatives. The sense of loss is palpable. I particularly enjoyed the set piece crowd scenes, though the friend I was with found them overly self-conscious. The only way this film can move towards resolution is through magic realism: by the time it occurs, it feels a fictional solution is the only one that can be offered. The two main characters, who have developed a relationship of sorts, turn their back on the commodification of their entire existence when they decide not to sell the piano, and instead, float home on it, in an image reminiscent of a Chagall painting. Hard to know what to make of this ending - sentimental cop-out? or final statement of resilience and hope? The landscape is stunning, the abstraction of the snow works to underline the fluidity of landscape, the sense of people lost between nations, between continents even(echoed in the looks of the young women, who seem to hover between European fullness and Asian exoticism). The vodka lemon of the title works to emphasise both the harshness of the existence these people have (they drink to forget) but also their underlying hope (they drink to celebrate) and finally the sense nothing is quite what it seems (it is called vodka lemon but tastes like almonds). Interesting enough and worth 90 mins of your time.
Review of Vodka Lemon
