Rating of
3/4
Send me bus fare so I can cheat on your mom!
Snake Sugarbaker - wrote on 12/14/09
At the start of Vodka Lemon, Hamo (Romen Avinian), an Armenian man in his 60s, travels to the capital to collect a parcel from his son. Expecting hard foreign currency, widower Hamo is disappointed to discover only a letter.
For Hamo, like many others in his backwater village, a $10 per month expense account is barely sufficient (even for an Armenian backwater). Hamo's widowed neighbor Nina (Lala Sarkissian), for instance, is ****ed when she's laid off from the roadside vodka stand where she earns a similar salary. With precious little else for unemployed citizens to do in the snowy Armenian Caucuses, Hamo and Nina visit their spouses daily and befriend one another on the bus ride there.
The film is primarily about loss, whether it be young sons traveling to the West for employment, a death of a spouse, or the meagerness of crucial government subsidies. Even so, the film never becomes melodramatic or preachy; skillfully understated and well photographed, Vodka Lemon adeptly conveys the frustration and desperation of post-Soviet rural life, while also asserting human resilience. Though the film doesn't end with newfound love, riches, or even an epiphany, its heroes (and its audience) are rewarded with something more satisfying--as Hamo and Nina are reminded that, much like the stark and snowy landscape surrounding them, their lives are at once staggeringly bleak and staggeringly beautiful.
