Vodka-Limón (2003): Dignity breaks the backbone of necessity Alfonso Sastre and Eva Forest, in memoriam Read FREE BOOKS EDUARDO GALEANO, CHRONICLER OF THE NOBODY, PASSES AWAY LINKS

When something bad happens you drink to forget it, if something good happens you drink to celebrate it. And if nothing happens you also drink so that something happens. CHARLES BUKOWSKI

ElCine-Club Al Filo del Tiempo begins the year 2022 with the Cine & Alcohol Cycle and the films: Vodka-Limón (2003), by the Armenian HinerSaleem; Leaving Las Vegas (1995), by Mike Figgis; First Reformed (2017), by Paul Schrader; and Druk (2020), by Thomas Vinterberg. Cinema is not only visible but sensible, says Rancière (1), and Vodka-Lemon proves that. What is not an apology for alcohol, since it is a drug like coffee or any soft or hard drug: it is about alcohol in its relationship with the cinema and as a reason for celebration, struggle or mourning, etc. Story that happens in one of the many Kurdish villages in the Caucasus in the impoverished/devastated post-USSR Armenia. There, victims of all the hairs try to survive between dignity, a past of genocide and the future anchored in the illusion or the turns of some family member who emigrated. In the midst of a deadly cold and the artificial heat of vodka, there is also love, even if it is not at first sight, nor so torrid, nor in desired socio/economic/political conditions. But, there is also the heartbreak product of the disastrous influence of capitalism (which leads to the exploitation of an artist by a pedophile), which starts from Stalin's first post-war Five-Year Plan; from the Triple Alliance after Churchill's words about 'communist expansion' with which he warned the US; since the declaration, March 12, 1947, by Harry Truman that would become the text of the Doctrine of the same name: that is, the unilateral opening of the so-called 'Cold War', ultimately hotter/brutal than WW1 and WWII. (two)

The opening shot/sequence, in addition to being surreal, seems to be a metaphor for the avalanche of misfortunes that occur within the film, all in some way lit/illuminated by the alcohol, the party, the humor (between black and rough), the inter/extra conflict. /family, the aftermath of the war, the (badly named) end of socialism: in the end, what ended was each of the socialist or communist governments (with the exception of Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, to name just three) ruined, on the one hand, because of lousy governments and, on the other, because of the blatant or veiled interventionism of the US and England since the Stalin Era. Who, although no one could completely defend, is neither the only nor the main person responsible for the Soviet debacle after World War II, since the political hypocrisy of France and Italy also had an impact, whose respective PCs were at first partners and then traitors. to the Soviet cause for turning in favor of gringo interference in internal affairs. And the shot/sequence reveals a bed that descends through the snow at high speed, apparently by inertia, until it is seen that it is being pulled by a truck. The old musician, who comes to accompany a funeral, removes his dental prostheses, picks up his flute and begins to play.

Shot/sequencemetaphor of the vertiginous fall of the USSR at different times: starring Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, the three cheerful alcohol compadres, but before, customary drunkards (as in the Common Grave, José Manuel Marroquín, Guillermo León Valencia, Virgilio Barco and who knows how many more unreported as such). Perhaps this is not the original intention of Hiner Saleem, but it should be remembered that art does not obey intentions, but produces effects. And the effects are more a product of the viewer's elective and unconscious affinities, of his relationship with the world, than of a rational / conscious mental and / or artistic elaboration of the Kurdish filmmaker.

One of the first signs of the visible associated with the sensitive is given by a secondary character: the bus driver who, being Armenian, sings in French. Baghdasarian, the 'Ambassador of the Chanson Française'. Such a driver gives the first diegetic indications, typical of the film, about the presence of love in order to dissipate human absence. Indeed, perhaps he has fallen in love at first sight with Nina, the woman who manages the vodka-lemon store, which is also a restaurant, and runs a common huckster. That's why, every time he gets on the bus, he doesn't care if she tells him he'll pay 'next time', until there's no next time, and then, on his behalf, the more white than red grasshopper named Kamo comes, who pays him five dollars for Nina's debt. When the approach of both is already evident, the driver throws the cassette out the window whose tape, due to the effect of the air, is destroyed. Thus has ended a love that was concocted unilaterally, fueled by Platonism, with no real basis and whose disenchantment is the result of the impossibility of programming the feelings of others. As A. Kluge puts it in his story about Nazism, An Experiment in Love. (3)

Facing the photo of his wife, dead, he tells her that 'everyone is fine' (4); Later, he imagines her looking at him badly when Nina says 'Merci': recovering his usual gesture, Kamo reveals that money is needed for everything today, especially if it has gone from socialism to capitalism: to pay for gas, electricity, water. 'It is no longer the USSR,' he says. Behind that other sign of surrealism, Saleem allows us to verify the impoverishment of Kurdistan and the loss of horizons of the people after twelve years of independence and capitalism. The same thing that happens in Kazakhstan, a country that today is experiencing a coup, a dubious 'color revolution' supported by the gringos (5): like the Hungarian of 1956, the French May/68, the Czech of 1989, the Polish of the 'Solidarity' union , 1980, the China of Celestial Plaza, also from 1989, Perestroika, a reform to liberalize the economy, promote the country's development and Western-type 'democratization', and Glásnost, 'openness' or 'transparency' to generate internal controversies free and open exchanges between citizens on socio/political issues: in short, the initial knockout for the end of the USSR, 1991. And, of course, the 'Arab Spring' in Mubarak's Egypt, on Jan. 25, 2011, the 'revolution' that today Abdelfatá Al Sisi's regime insists on not remembering (6) and now wants to arm Egypt to the teeth, with its purchases from Italy, Germany and Russia. Even so, the Egyptian military budget, 1.2% of its GDP, falls short of the GDP of the countries that buy their weapons from the US: Saudi Arabia, 8%; Iran, 2.3%; Turkey, 2.7%. (7)

Later, Kamo apologizes to his late wife because she needs to sell the TV. She has already sold her wardrobe, as well as her ex-soldier clothes. For the piece of furniture she asked for US$30 and they gave her ten. On TV, after the client's chattering, he tells him: 'a bargain, US$150'. 'No, very expensive. $100'. Later, they give her 'no more than US$80'. And for her uniform, she asks her usual clients for US$20: she receives US$8. Nina's husband died in 1994. She is a mature woman, not an old woman. , has two daughters: the eldest, lives in Kazakhstan. Zine, the youngest, is her company and consolation, so ignore what she lives off of the known: she is an artist/pianist, plays in a restaurant, without salary, for tips. As in any Common Grave Carulla. 'I have three sons,' says Kamo, with obvious sympathy and charisma: Guje, lives in Samarkand. Kamo son, in Alfaville, France; (8) yDilovan lives in Kurdistan, but without working. The characters in the film silently exhort Proust: "Our social personality is a creation of the thought of others." (9) Fictional characters cease to be so due to the degree of plausibility reached in their making, process and narrative development, until they become almost flesh and blood, as they carry a truth. But, not an objective or objective truth, but a perceivable one, that of artists, poets and writers, rather than another demonstrable one, that of judges, lawyers and politicians.

In a later sequence, the store owner walks up to Nina and asks about the number of bottles sold: '17,' she says. 'Oh, that's a good start,' points out the merchant's hypocrisy. And she immediately releases the final blow: the business is not giving what is expected and, in addition, the restaurant must be closed. Around this situation, it must be said that alcohol serves to quasi-alleviate an attempted murder. Meanwhile, old Kamo chews his bitterness when he goes to the post office, after a difficult trip in which he and his companion end up losing their 'mats' that simulate cushions when the motorcycle leaves alone, and he sees how his son, whom he hopes a hypothetical twist, before, he asks for money. Disillusionment has a discreet face. Life gives you surprises, life will always give you surprises, especially if you are within capitalism. The one that, as in the case of Zine, collects dramatic dividends but that, thanks to the filmmaker and the acting management, manages to distance herself, in a certain Brechtian way, so that both she, her beloved mother, the viewer, do not come out completely deflated or, much less, dejected or dismayed. Although soon it goes from acid humor to sad pathos.

In effect, the young artist/pianist Zine only receives ten dollars from the pedophile who exploits her, while she has asked him, for her pranks, nothing funny but fucked up, US$ 40. He, with a cheek that borders on (bad) cynicism, tells him that he gave him food and chocolates and that, moreover, 'even your underwear is mine': without this necessarily implying that the obscene old man is a transvestite or 'cross-dresser', as it is now said of the one who dresses/behaves in the gender opposite to which he was born. (10) What he doesn't admitdoubt: he's a bastardazi. After shaking her and spitting nonsense at her, she gets in her car, turns it on, and drives off at full speed. The pianist and prostitute, this due to the lack of a decent job, victim of humiliation and offense, while she returns home, she preens herself a bit so as not to go to her mother, who is so disastrous for her. The landscape, however, could not be more bleak/devastating, a sad example of the human condition subjected to perhaps the oldest exercise, but the most renewed by the effect of capitalism. The same one that degrades to the maximum through exploitation without brake or ethics and in which, of course, the unrewarding prostitution activity has no possibility of emancipation. And it is that of all the 'human works' referred to by Marx, it is the only one in which what is sold is exactly what is not sold in any other work. Prostitution is the only occupation in which the renting of one or more parts of the body is prohibited in all the others. Thus, it separates itself from the rest of the 'human works' that Marx speaks of in Volume I of Capital. (eleven)

And those 'human jobs' were the ones that stopped being carried out in the USSR, during the Stalin era, and, due to interference from the gringo, but also from England, became normalized with the arrival of the 'opening' (such as the Common Grave with Gaviria) and 'transparency', from the Gorbachev era, until it remained after the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, when after the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania was recognized in September and the independence of other republics was given, Gorbachev, first claim authority, that is, fascism disguised as good intentions, and then, on December 8, 1991, proclaim from the rooftops the dissolution of the USSR. All this, in fact, starts from Stalin and his little lucid outings and reactions, despite his appearance of a great 'military strategist', referred to by Isaac Deutscher in his political biography of who was a leader from 1924, to the death of Lenin, until his own death in 1953 : Josef Stalin or Iósif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

In that period, it was not at all easy to establish how the Soviet people responded to the demands, not infrequently mixed with arbitrariness, of the native politician from Gori, Georgia, nor which of them responded to the needs of the largest nation on Earth or so many others just to the impositions of the Stalinist regime. Those who survived the battle of Moscow and the Nazi occupation of Leningrad, as well as the winners in Stalingrad and Berlin, after killing seven million Germans (while they had already liquidated 23 million Russians), were prey to optimism for the future when returning to their homes. Seeing the cities in ruins and the villages on fire, they were aware of the misery of their lives, the impoverishment and repression they had to endure in times of peace and because of this, they had made the decision to seek a freer, less unhappy country. But, given the evidence, they understood that only thanks to effort, struggle, exhaustion, could they rebuild the foundations of life in common and rarely could they recognize which decrees favored the 'common good' and which barely favored their bureau/car. /cracy. Stalin, for example, hid the real death toll in the war and put it at just seven million. Thus, by the way, he prevented the people from counting the casualties because he sensed a danger to himself: if he had allowed the truth to be known, he would have insisted on discovering the reasons for the events, including the failures and screw-ups and the (bad) calculations of the Russian leader himself.

Even so, it must be said that not all the drama was carried out by him alone: ​​in aid of the recurrent gringo 'divide and conquer', acts such as the punishments of civilians that the enemy, Nazi Germany, had forced to forced labor came in droves; then, the soldiers accused of being traitors for disobeying Stalin: they should never have been caught alive by the Nazis; again the civilians for collaborationists. Which reminds us of the brawls between fossacommunianos, guerrillas and paramilitaries. Now, Stalin had already ordered the deportation of various nationalities for 'treason': the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens/Ingush, the Volga Germans, forced to leave their native soil to end up in the Siberian deserts/steppes, and (no) Finally, the Ukrainians who had 'better luck' because, as there were too many of them, their exile and prison were replaced by servitude. The unlimited punishments, obeyed to control the audacity of those who had returned from the war with ideas of change and reforms for the USSR. Finally, two key facts are included in this column of The Factory of Dreams: 1. The Marshall Plan offered to help governments struggling 'against poverty and chaos left by war', which was very attractive even to communists Eurasian 2. The gringos wanted to 'rehabilitate' the German economy and dismiss the claims of the USSR, Czechoslovakia and Poland against Germany 'for war damages', as they had already done after the Treaty of Versailles. (12) The (dirty) Dawes Plan would come soon.

With regard to Stalin, two facts related to his discredit are referred to here, the one caused, as has already been said, by Churchill, that is, England, and later by the different US governments: 1. The film The Death of Stalin (2017, Netflix), by Armando Iannucci, based on the comic The Death of Stalin, by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, with an original script by the former. 2. The (demo) film Don't Look Up (2021, Netflix), by Adam McKay, with LeonardoDiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in the main roles. Iannucci's shows the excellent memory of the gringos to face the defects, damages and monstrosities of the 'enemy', but an absolute amnesia to find his own and speak openly and self-critically. They don't know, fortunately, that the day they make a similar film they are going to make the box office they never dreamed of. Not only do they distort/stigmatize whoever comes to mind, Stalin, Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Molotov, etc., but they also profit from them and alter the orbital status quo, without any other country saying anything about their 'Cultural and Entertainment Industry' ', his corrupt and self-interested media propaganda inherited from the Nazis (“lie, lie, something remains”); this, the same one that, in the words of the libertarian Julian Assange, is the one that for more than 50 years, with its lies passed for irrefutable truths (Fake-News), has produced all wars. Between the US and Israel and the Jewish/German Jacob Rothschild, 'owner' of 96% of the information, 80% of which is given without being confirmed. This speculation is what feeds that other speculation that capitalism generates with its 'market society', its NY Stock Exchange, its Wall Street, which in itself leads to the exploitation of the majority by a few bastards: 'philanthropists', bankers, politicians from all the hairs, which cause division, protests and wars everywhere, to later obtain the greatest profits at the expense of the people.

Nomires above, is really Look down and obey, if this comedy is considered to be more of a parody: an imitation of something that is not concrete or is excessively vague; and snorts: it seeks to be funny, but it is grotesque because it is ridiculous and inspires more contempt than laughter. The obsessive recurrence of gringo cinema to apocalyptic plots only shows its inability to face the present with political ethics and historical responsibility. This is reflected in two films by McKay: The Big Short (2015), an eagerness to explain the financial crash caused by the real estate bubble of 2007, and Don't LookUp, with the same formula: that the ethical misery of the brazen is what leads to disasters to overcome. Thus, if they died, the others could be saved and return to their blissful existence. Calculation error because collective problems do not arise from individual stupidity in an economic system so plagued with contradictions. No, a capitalist society needs fools to survive and prolong its validity.

There is no other System that feeds so much on crises. The cretinism of the bourgeoisie and elites, subject to unconditional obedience, is the only acceptable reason for said System and the catastrophe its only praiseworthy effect. For this reason, although its aims seem noble, Don't look up becomes a caricature turned against its creators, given the pastiche, pamphlet, grotesque character of the material and its explicit attacks: the identity with which Janie Orlean seems to make fun of Trump, ends up being a patriarchal mockery / macho to demerit women as leaders. As it happened to the plutocrat (without money) brought to power by the financial system (today chosen by Big-Pharma, Biden case) under the nickname of the 'first black president of the United States': the one who dropped the most bombs in a single year against seven invaded countries .To conclude, there is not and will not be ethical or political capitalism because it is democratic, as long as it continues to appeal to fear, to fascism, to violence, in the daily lives of peoples. There will be no peace or calm in a world where the one who works the land is the one who receives the least; where protest is criminalized and obedience rewarded; where children are abused/neglected, young people are killed and old people are ignored; where the death apparatus, not the health system, does not even comply with the formula for the elderly; where education ceased to be public to become the weakest fortress of the powerful and ignorant; where there is only division of classes and/or extermination of the population; where the wealth produced by the majority is monopolized by a few families. The meteor that is about to fall on Earth has already arrived and is called Capitalism. The catastrophe is at the doors of the rich in Hollywood, which makes their films point to everyone looking down and obeying without question at the risk of being arrested, disappeared or exterminated, without consideration, by the owners of the lives of others.

The mother, Nina, in a somewhat different environment, at least from the appearance, warmer, waits in front of a window for her daughter Zine de Ella. A tracking shot (“All traveling is a matter of morality”, recalls the nonagenarian Godard), slow, from left to right, leads to it. That artist who could be a Kafkaesque 'hunger artist', but no, ends up showing that, despite their proximity, two beings do nothing more than infinitely reproduce the strange existential paradox: so far, so close. That person who is far from another can be very close, closer than expected by convention, while the one who is closer can be as far away as the most dreamed of treasure for the impoverished or the greatest dream for the lover. Perhaps the Iraqi Kurdish filmmaker himself is not aware of this, but cinema, apart from being the art of the visible, is the art of the sensible; on the other hand, in art nothing turns out as planned and truths are nothing more than illusions, mobile armies of metaphors, coins no longer considered that, but metal. (Nietzsche) (13) So no one is surprised by what the viewer perceives of the characters or events narrated by Saleem: after all, they are identified to a greater or lesser degree depending on the vital or cultural experiences of one and the other; or sensory empathy, v. gr., with the driver who sings Tombe la neige, by Salvatore Adamo (14), or with the musicians who play traditional Kurdish tunes or with the inhabitants of the city of Rya Taza, in Avehen, and of the Aparan region. The perception can be immediate.

Faced with the delicate situation of impoverishment, hunger and hardship, personal, family, environmental, the last thing to sell: the piano. Kamo: “Brother, we won't sell it”. And the potential buyer: “I understand, bye-bye” (15). The piano starts like a car with a rudder, its owners with their backs to the spectator, and not because they are rude, just as Miles Davis was not rude when he played like this in front of the public, perhaps saying that the important thing was/is the music and not its performers, like here in Vodka- Limónlo are Kamo and Nina and Zine; it reiterates, with its owners touching it as it appears to have acquired wheels and takes them safely to another destination. The one that they have tried to build on a love that is not immediate but slow, that of two adults who have already had enough experiences, some parallel, others completely alien and individual, and who now move forward as a team, like those who know that loneliness is not good company or That ideal company called loneliness goes better hand in hand with a partner who respects each other. The vodka-lemon has finished, but not before remembering that alcohol is used for everything, according to the uses that the human being confers on it: to exalt oneself, to mistreat oneself, to debase oneself. As in the wedding sequence, at whose ends are Hamo , Avin's father, and Giano, whom the former injures, for mistreating his daughter, money issues over sheep and later they say goodbye as if nothing had happened, when crossing the stream that divides the local residents.

The Vodka-Lemon film has ended, but the taste of life, despite everything, is now pleasant. And it is all the more so because noble dignity breaks the backbone of vulgar necessity. In the midst of death, famine, and vicissitudes, genuine love has flourished. Perhaps not the most abundant in terms of passion, in any case a very generous one in terms of sensitivity/audience and, of course, visibility: that of all great cinema. The one that is done first as art and then it will be seen if it works as an industry; but not the other way around, like the one that today passes as acceptable, normal, worthy of Netflix, HBO or any other virtual platform created by the hegemonic 'Cultural Industry' and media and, obviously, by capitalism, as Che said, "the genocidal most respected in the world. The main cause of the planet's debacles, but that many, in their laziness in the face of the fate of others, pretend to ignore or pretend to be crazy, the 'philanthropists', the 'perfectionists' and are nothing more than leeches of the local/regional treasury/ national or orbital: those who drink to celebrate the misfortunes of the Other.

To Santiago, with whom although I have not had Vodka-Lemon, I hope one day to drink Absinthe, to celebrate his struggles against adversity, although more than anything his achievements in favor of life.

Notes, links and bibliography

(1) RANCIÈRE, Jacques. Bela Tarr. After the end. The silver bowl, Bs. Aires, 2013, 85 pp.: 11.

(2) DEUTSCHER, Isaac. Stalin – Political biography. Ediciones Era, Mexico, 1976, 579 pp.: 516 to 571.

(3) HERRERO, F. / HINA, H. German narrative of today. Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, ​​1975, 146 pp.: 41/44.

(4) Nod to the Italian Giuseppe Tornatore for his film Stanno Tutti Bene (2009) or They're all good.

(5) https://rebelion.org/kazakhstan-under-destabilizing-fire/

(6) https://elpais.com/internacional/2021-01-26/el-egipto-de-al-sisi-no-quiere-recordar-la-revolucion.html

(7) https://elpais.com/internacional/2021-01-10/al-sisi-quiere-armar-a-egipto-hasta-los-dientes.html#?rel=mas

(8) Another wink, this time from Saleem to Godard for his science-fiction film Alphaville (1965), in b/w.

(9) PROUST, Marcel. By the way of Swann. Santiago Rueda Editor, Bs. Aires, 1927, PDF, 393 pp.: 18.

(10) https://elpais.com/ccaa/2018/04/30/catalunya/1525110452_040639.html

(11) https://traductorasparaaboliciondelaprostitucion.weebly.com/blog/marx-y-la-cuestion-de-la-prostitucion

(12) Ibidem, 1976: 516 to 571. From 1919. And in 1924, the gringo Dawes Plan that would ruin the Germans.

(13) NIETZSCHE, Friedrich (1988): Nietzsche, JB Llinares (Ed.) Barcelona, ​​Peninsula, at p. 14: https://docplayer.es/4426598-El-analisis-de-textos-audiovisuales-significacion-y-sentido.html

(14) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUJ2NijL-As

(15) The possible 'buyer' is none other than the film's director himself: Hiner Saleem.

TECHNICAL SHEET: Original title: Vodka Lemon. Spanish: Vodka-Lemon. Country: France / Italy / Switzerland / Armenia. Year: 2003. Format: 35 mm.; colour, 86 min. Dir.: Hiner Saleem. Screenplay: Lei Dinety / Pauline Gouzenne / HS Prod.: Fabrice Guez. Executive Producer: Michel Loro. Music: Michel Korb. Int.: Kamo (Romen Avinian); Nina (Lala Sarkissian); Dilovan (Ivan Franěk); Zine (Ronzanna-Vite Merropian); Giano (Zahal Karielachvili); Avin (Astrik Avaguian); Romik (Armen Maronthian); Bus driver / singer (Armen Sarkissian). Awards: 60th Venice International Film Festival: San Marco Award for Best Film (2003). Newport Beach Film Festival: Jury Award for Best Film / Best Actor (2004). International Love Film Festival (Mons, 2004): Grand Prize / Jury Prize / Best Photography (2004).

* (Bogotá, Colombia, 1957) Father of Santiago & Valentina. Writer, journalist, literary, film and jazz critic, professor, lecturer, proofreader, translator and, above all, reader. Contributor to El Magazín de EE, 2012, and columnist, 23/Mar/2018. His book Eight minutes and other stories, Collection 50 books of Contemporary Colombian Short Story, was launched at the XXX FILBO (Pijao, 2017). Honorable Mention for Martin Luther King: Every personal/inner change makes the world progress, at the XV International Thinking Against the Current Essay Prize, Havana, Cuba (2018). Seven essays on imperialisms – Literature and biopolitics, co-authored with Luís E. Soares, was published by UFES, Vitória (Edufes, 2020). The book The (counter)colonial statute of Humanity, product of the III Int. Congress of Literature and Revolution, was launched by UFES on Feb/20/2021. Author, translator and co-author, with Luis E. Soares, on the Rebelión portal.

Rebelión has published this article with the permission of the author through a Creative Commons license, respecting his freedom to publish it in other sources.