OVP: The Milk of Sorrow (2009)

Film: The Milk of Sorrow (2009)

Stars: Magaly Solier, Susi Sanchz, Efrain Solis, Barbara Lazon

Director: Claudia Llosa

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Peru)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Every year, there’s one.  Dogtooth comes to mind immediately.  As does War Witch.  As does Bullhead.  Amidst the rise-against-a-dictator movies and Holocaust dramas and coming-of-age comedies, there’s a film that somehow doesn’t fall into the standard fallbacks for the Oscars and instead comes out of left field (though it happens every year, so we should expect it by now).  In 2009, our OVP film year to be, this movie was The Milk of Sorrow.

The thing about this out-of-left-field pattern is that it doesn’t necessarily equate to a brilliant cinematic experience, and this is true of The Milk of Sorrow.  The film’s plot is pretty thin, and I actually went back and researched the movie’s history, learning about the very violent period Peru experienced during the 1980’s and early 1990’s, when women were frequently the victims of assault.  The belief in the region is that through the breast milk of the women who became pregnant due to rape, their children experience the trauma and suffer from the “milk of sorrow.”

(Spoilers Ahead) That is the case of our heroine, Fausta (Solier), who has become psychologically-damaged by the stories of her mother’s assault.  The film opens with a harrowing scene of her mother, on her death bed, singing songs about her rape years earlier, and you can see that while the Milk of Sorrow may not be a real thing, the damage of years of stories about the evils of men surely has caused Fausta to become paranoid to an unhealthy level.  Fausta refuses to walk by herself, and you see in her face the constant fear of suffering the same fate as her mother, persistently pushing away romantic paramours and living a lonely existence.  The most famous scene in the movie, where Fausta visits a doctor’s office and it is revealed that she has put a potato in her vagina to stave off being assaulted is played for both shock and comic value, and it’s one of the few scenes of levity amidst a depressing slumber of a movie (it’s some dark humor, obviously, considering her reasoning behind this serious medical infraction).

The film, Peru’s first to ever receive an Oscar nomination (I always get all giddy when this happens, as I know it’s a fairly well-celebrated event in countries getting their first Oscar nod), has little to offer aside from a pretty strong performance from Solier in the lead and some provocative camerawork.  The cinematography takes on a lavender and tan palette, occasionally erupting in beautiful shots of green, and this is likely what drove the Academy toward the film.  There is something to be said for this, but the Oscars already have a category for Cinematography and this would have been more appropriate there rather than citing the entire product, which is dull and lifeless.

For those of you who have seen it, did you share a different opinion than I regarding the movie (considering the reviews, I’m very much in the minority)?  What did you think of the stellar visuals on display in the movie?  Were you puzzled at the way the film remained so wordless?  And what do you think Fausta’s ultimate fate was (the ending is ambiguous)?  Share in the comments!