Dramatist and film-maker Rebecca Lenkiewicz presents Berlin with a complicated, interestingly elusive Valentine’s Day present: her adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel Hot Milk, which appears to anaesthetise emotional pain with the sensual languour of a summer sexual awakening, that title perhaps alluding to the overheated, unwholesome quality of the mother’s milk metaphorically involved in a parent-child relationship. Or perhaps it ironically inverts the idea of a placidly bedtime drink of northern climes, which is of no earthly interest in the film’s passionately sunny, southern European settings.
Fiona Shaw gives an excellent performance as Rose – querulous, cantankerous, witty – an Irish woman in her 60s using a wheelchair due to some mysterious ailment or psychosomatic condition. If it is the second, what is the cause? She has brought along her twentysomething daughter Sofia (Emma Mackey) with her on a trip to Spain where as a desperate last resort, she is going to consult an expensive private consultant Dr Gomez (Vincent Perez) about the debilitating pains in her bones and joints.
While Rose is receiving treatment, something she treats with the same waspish scepticism as everything else, Sofia gets to hang out by the sea where she meets and becomes entranced with Ingrid, played by Vicky Krieps, a sensual free spirit who rides a horse along the beach and affects a Romany headscarf. As their relationship progresses, Ingrid reveals a childhood trauma which perhaps has an echo with Rose’s own hidden trauma; meanwhile, Sofia’s visit to her estranged Greek father does not seem to bring any calm or closure.
Levy’s fictions present a distinctive challenge to the film-maker, of representing the more ruminative and contemplative qualities, and Lenkiewicz, in my view, has does done a happier and more successful job than the recent adaptation of Levy’s Swimming Home.
The eroticism of what is happening is always undercut by the very real and very unsexy issue of if and how and when Sofia’s mother is going to stop using a wheelchair. The result is a complicated soup of moods and ideas, and the film is always in danger of drifting out into a sea of ambiguity – the ending brings us uncomfortably close to absurdity and even silliness. But the fierce sinew of Shaw’s performance gives the film some shape and keeps it grounded. Mackey and Krieps, both formidable performers, give the film their presence and force.
• Hot Milk screened at the Berlin film festival.
