Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Hot Milk’ Review: Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Spare Adaptation of Deborah Levy’s Acclaimed Psychodrama Hums With Tension – Berlin Film Festival
Sofia takes a picture of Ingrid, her summer friend, at her sewing table. “Your August in Almeria…” murmurs Ingrid (a wonderfully feline Vicky Krieps) as she takes pliant Sofia (Emma Mackey) in her arms. But Almeria doesn’t look much of a romantic idyll here, at least wherever Sofia chooses to go: it’s all industrial sites, mean little lean-to cafes, rocky breakwaters and concrete boxes of holiday shacks, besieged by mosquitoes.
Even the sea, her cool blue refuge, teems with poisonous tentacles. “We should have rented somewhere else,” sniffs her mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) from her wheelchair. “I like it here,” says Sofia mutinously. It’s a very low-level mutiny. Fetching and carrying for her mother is Sofia’s life.
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Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s adaptation of Deborah Levy’s award-winning 2016 novel hums with tension from the first moment we see tourists on a strip of beach in front of bald, rocky, utterly unlovely hills: Greece, actually, standing in for southern Spain. Rose has mortgaged her house to come here, seeking the magically curative talents of one Dr. Gomez, who ignores her bone wastage while prodding at her memories of her hostile parents and mysteriously dead sister.
Sofia encounters Ingrid, glowingly Germanic and glamorous, riding a horse along the wet sand. It turns out that she, too, has a missing sister: another hidden story, another suggestion of guilt and darkness looming in the past. A strange, keening soundtrack, blended with the furious barking of a tethered dog next door, sustains the sense of vague threat in between the snaps of dialogue. Ingrid is a kind of siren; she seduces Sofia, tells her she loves her, invites her to Berlin, but simultaneously flaunts the fact she is also having sex with her driver, her riding teacher and who knows who else. What game is she playing? Nothing is right here. Nothing is right with anybody.
Lenkiewicz is new to directing, but has a long career as a writer for both film and television; her last film was She Said, an admirably sober journalistic procedural about the New York Times’ investigation of Harvey Weinstein. Hot Milk, with its deep dive into family pathology, is obviously a different kind of story. She Said was piled with detail. Hot Milk is spare, rigorously structured but enigmatic, with a shocking ending that could fuel weeks of argument.
The complex dependencies and jealousies between mothers and daughters are not exactly virgin territory, but Levy and Lenkiewicz have a tough take on the way the mother’s sins are visited on her child that is frank and fresh enough to make us gasp. Shaw, as the needling mother who controls her daughter with a combination of martyrdom and mockery, is truly extraordinary. “My first enemy and adversary was endurance,” she sighs, ever the matriarch, to young nurse Julieta (Patsy Ferran), who can read the pain in her legs like runes. Only the muscle twitching in her neck betrays this queenly act; how Shaw manages to switch on this apparently involuntary tell is a thespian mystery.
On the face of it, not much happens here; there are gradations in mood, like light changing over the course of a day, along with a seeping of details about Rose’s past, but the drama is kept corralled for the final showpiece. A flying visit by Sofia to Greece to see her estranged father is potentially a triggering interlude, but it passes amiably; Greece is much the same as Spain and her father and his new wife live modestly. It is only Rose who thinks that he is a shipping billionaire hiding his riches from his daughter, Rose who says he lies about everything, even the way they used to play chess when they couldn’t sleep. Although, of course, that may be a lie. The past can be endlessly contested.
In part, the open weave of the story reflects the text from which it is taken, which has multiple possible interpretations. By my reading of Levy’s novel, Dr. Gomez — who doesn’t want to be addressed as Doctor, perhaps because he isn’t one — is an ambiguous kind of healer: caring but mercenary, perceptive but full of crank theories, authoritative but essentially a shyster.
In Vincent Perez’s interpretation, he is more of a kindly bystander, nudging Rose towards an accommodation with a past he knows is seething with monsters. Every actor, in fact, has clearly made choices about their characters, but the film leaves room to argue with them. Mackey plays subtly on Sofia’s petulance; Shaw finds a pathos in Rose’s chosen identity as an invalid. You can like Sofia or not, sympathize with Rose or not. As Gomez might say, it is that response that is the real reveal.
Title: Hot Milk
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Director: Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Screenwriter: Rebecca Lenkiewicz (based on the novel by Deborah Levy)
Cast: Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps, Vincent Perez, Patsy Ferran
Sales agent: HanWay Films
Running time: 1 hr 32 mins
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