In this slow-burning drama, a young woman navigates tangled family dynamics and sudden lust beneath a blazing sky.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
We should acknowledge an important sub-genre of films about young people at the beach with their parents. In “Hot Milk,” a young woman of Greek-British descent takes her ailing mother to the beach in Almeria, Spain (the film was shot in Greece). The young woman, Sofia (Emma Mackey, otherwise known by me as “the face”), works in a cafe, something her accomplished mother Rose (the great Irish actor Fiona Shaw) derides. Apparently unbeknownst to Rose, Sofia, who is taking a break from university, where she studies anthropology, is also writing a thesis about the enormously groundbreaking and iconic cultural anthropologist and author Margaret Mead. “I like how primitive it is here,” says Rose in a Mead-like reference to Spain’s Mediterranean coast. Rose is in a wheelchair, unable to walk due to pain in her lower extremities. Is her ailment psychosomatic?
Sofia is Rose’s languorously sexy daughter, roaming the beach like the tall, curious seeker she is. She is also Rose’s caretaker, and sometimes the tension between the two erupts into fierce shouting matches that eventually simmer down. Sofia takes Rose to a clinic where a sympathetic psychologist, Gomez (Vincent Perez), and his daughter, Nurse Julieta (Patsy Ferran), strive to help an often uncooperative Rose use insight into her past, possibly to alleviate her pain.
“Hot Milk” (I’m not sure what to make of the title) has an undeniable touchy-feelie dynamic. Based on the acclaimed 2016 novel by South African Deborah Levy, the film was adapted and directed by British first-timer Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who co-wrote the Oscar-winning 2013 film “Ida.” If someone is not adapting “Hot Milk” for the stage, I would be surprised. “Hot Milk” often seems itself like an adaptation of a play with many scenes featuring the mother and daughter inside their small beach house. The film is full of symbols. A shackled dog next door almost never ceases howling and whimpering. It is the film’s tortured soul. Sofia is stung painfully twice by jellyfish and tended to by a Spanish lifeguard. In the background, we hear the rhythmic stomping of young, female flamenco dancers, a beat to which we also dance. In the style of Henrik Ibsen, the disturbing past reveals itself to us inch by inch. In the meantime, a Valkyrie on horseback named Ingrid (Vicky Krieps) pulls up on Sofia, sleepily reclining in the hot (milky?) sand in her red bikini, and we almost hear a comic crack of thunder. Cowabunga. Sofia, whose face is alive with possibility, is utterly besotted and soon seduced. But the haunted Ingrid has sex with men, too, and Sofia becomes intensely jealous of Ingrid’s male lovers.
Rose, meanwhile, can hardly withstand the oppressive weight pressing her into her wheelchair. Her mood is often evil. “Hot Milk” could have been a Gothic novel, another “Jane Eyre,” perhaps with Rose as both the damaged Rochester and his mad wife, and Sofia as a modern-day caretaker Jane. “Hot Milk” also recalls the recently remade “Bonjour Tristesse,” based on Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel and featuring a father and adolescent daughter sharing a beach house on the French Riviera.
There is no avoiding the fact that Ingrid, who owns a shop and is a designer, and Rose resemble one another. Rose advises Sofia to visit her father, Christos (Vangelis Mourikis), who has remarried in Athens and recently welcomed an infant daughter, Sofia’s sister. It’s an odd, brief side trip. Everyone in “Hot Milk” smokes, making the film also a throwback to twisty film noirs. Out of the smoky past comes an Ibsen-esque revelation regarding Rose’s family history. With her long, dark hair, large, expressive eyes, high cheekbones, and pale skin, Mackey eerily resembles “scream queen” Barbara Steele and would also make a great screen witch. “Hot Milk” is often impressionistic with a histrionic ending capped by what appears to be archival footage of a Samoan knife dance, ah, more anthropology.
‘Hot Milk’
Rating: R for language, some sexuality and brief nudity.
Cast: Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps
Director: Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Writers: Lenkiewicz, Deborah Levy
Running time: 92 minutes
Where to watch: In theaters
Grade: B+
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