The Milk of Sorrow

The Milk of Sorrow, which I'm pretty sure is the first Peruvian film I've ever seen, is the last of last year's nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film that I've seen (the others were Ajami, Un Prophete, The Secret in Their Eyes, and The White Ribbon). It tells what seems like a simple tale but is magnified by its folklore elements into a metaphor for something far greater. As such, I don't think it fully succeeds, but I enjoyed parts of it.

The central character is Fausta (Magaly Solier), a young woman suffering from the title disease. It seems her mother was raped during a civil war, and passed her fear onto her daughter through her breast milk. She also taught her to extemporaneously create songs--the opening features the old woman singing about her rape, and how her attackers forced her to eat her husband's penis.

So Fausta lives in perpetual fear. She won't walk alone, and even when she does, won't stray far from walls, for fear of being taken by lost souls. And, this is a doozy, she has stuffed a potato up her vagina to ward off rapists. Every once in while she has to reach insider herself with scissors to clip off the potato's eyes.

As the movie begins the old lady dies, but the family has no money to bury her. Her uncle wants the corpse gone before his daughter's wedding. Fausta takes a job as a domestic for a concert pianist to earn money, who takes a liking to her when she hears her sing. She also strikes up a friendship with the gardener, but she wonders why he doesn't plant potatoes in the garden.

The film, directed by Claudia Llosa, is frequently visually arresting, whether it's a shot of plates at a wedding, a burning piano, a ridiculously long set of stairs going up a mountain, two women picking pearls up off a floor, or the last shot, a flowering potato. But I wonder how much of this film went completely over my head because of cultural differences. Is the title malady something that the Peruvian people really believe exist, or was it made up for the film? I would ask the same about the potato trick. Knowing more about Peru's political history might have helped, too.

I'm willing to assign much of the blame for my lackluster response to my own shortcomings, as the film is lovely to look at, and has a nice, hypnotic pace. Solier makes the most of a tough performance, as most of the time she is impassive, presumably out of this inherited terror, but at the end, when the character unburdens herself of it, she responds ably during the emotional scenes.

Of the five films, none of them completely bowled me over, so I would have probably voted for the eventual winner, The Secret of Their Eyes.