For a film set on the Iberian Peninsula, it’s no surprise that the title Hot Milk raises some questions. Adapted from Deborah Levy’s novel of the same name, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut follows Sofia (Emma Mackey) and Rose (Fiona Shaw), who have travelled from London to admit Rose to a treatment center for a series of chronic illnesses that have left her wheelchair-bound for years. Had the irony of the title carried over to any other aspect of the film, it could have made for a sharp family drama. As it stands, Lenkiewicz’s film is mainly limited to contrasting symbols that accomplish little more than to pad the narrative.
Hot milk never makes an appearance or even garners a mention in Lenkiewicz’s film, but the contrast between the seaside setting and this decidedly un-seaside-like beverage requires very little interpretive effort from the viewer. It’s a perfect symbol of the film’s overpowering ennui: thick, membranous, sleep-inducing. Just as Rosie, a sullen anthropology student, tries to deal with her mother’s biting criticisms and possibly psychosomatic ailments, the apparent origins of which, we come to learn, are far more traumatic but vaguely defined than she ever knew, the viewer must wade through Lenkiewicz’s story, a mire of unsophisticated psychology and underbaked narrative divergences, shone through a largely unfocused lens.
One such divergence concerns the hot and cold romance Sofia shares with bohemian artist and occasional equestrian, Ingrid (a direly underutilized Vicky Krieps), which Sofia perplexingly manages to spark despite her oppressive dispiritedness and the pair’s one instance of shared eye contact on the beach. Plagued by her own childhood traumas, Ingrid works in the film as a mirror to Rose; the emotional and physical release Sofia enjoys in Ingrid’s company, however inconsistent, gives her the strength to combat her strident mother, whose character is defined mainly by her stream of unpredictable whims, petty grievances, and, on occasion, a biting sense of humor (though these all feel inherent to Shaw’s natural breadth of charisma more than anything to do with the written character).
Mackey is an able performer, capable of conveying a wide range of emotional wounds through minute variations of expression; indeed, apart from the film’s final 10 minutes of too-little-too-late catharsis, Mackey’s natural state is repressed frustration and creeping resentment. Lenkiewicz’s film suffers, however, because Sofia is never provided — except for the narratively functional, on-and-off romance with Ingrid — a propulsive source of desire. Sofia’s academic identity is little more than dressing, her research on Margaret Mead’s ideas about life’s flexibility and elasticity called upon multiple times only to draw glaringly obvious connections between it and her strained relationship with Rose. These attempts to deepen Sofia’s sense of individuality only ever feel half-hearted. It is, however, a relief that Sofia’s moment of clarity regarding her mother is not directly drawn from her engagement with her academic work, instead emerging organically from the events of the film itself.
While Sofia navigates her halting romance with Ingrid, Rose attends the treatment center run by Dr. Gomez (Vincent Perez), whose soft, bourgeois good looks divert her attention away, at least initially, from the lack of hard medical treatment she receives. Besides reducing the quantity of prescriptions she takes, Dr. Gomez is more interested in cracking open Rose’s calcified shell of denial about her childhood trauma than finding the medical root cause of her paralysis. Rose, of course, isn’t interested in Dr. Gomez’s quasi-shamanic approach. She eventually does divulge the “truth” about her childhood, though to Sofia, not Dr. Gomez. That truth is vague; its specifics, those that can be gleaned from Rose’s sparse recollection in a parked car in the middle of the road in the film’s final few minutes, right out of Chinatown.
Hot Milk is neither psychologically rich nor dramatically affecting. Its contemplative pace dresses the proceedings in superficial import, but there’s an unavoidable shallowness in its treatment of trauma, a reluctance to swim out to sea and risk drowning. Sofia’s own ventures into open water might be viewed as failures, though at least her two painful encounters with jellyfish opened up her world in ways it wouldn’t have been otherwise. Which is to say, she at least had the gumption to seek something beyond herself.
DIRECTOR: Rebecca Lenkiewicz; CAST: Emma Mackey, Vicky Krieps, Fiona Shaw, Vincent Perez; DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films; IN THEATERS: June 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 32 min.
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