The Milk of Sorrow

The Milk of Sorrow

94 Minutes

The Milk of Sorrow opens with a horrifying monologue delivered in the form of a song by Fausta’s (Magaly Solier) mother, Perpetua (Bárbara Lazón), before dying. She narrates her husband’s murder and her rape at the hands of mercenaries during the internal conflict in Peru, as it is clear she has done several times over the course of her young daughter’s life. These traumas, mentioned explicitly at this point in the film and referred to in passing sporadically throughout, need to be clear at the beginning so that they can permeate the rest of the film in an unspoken way, so that it can be steeped in this emotional landscape. The film embeds the impression and then sustains it. What this does serves to undercut the expectations of distance that its immediate impressions create as a long take-style art film.

Slowly but surely, the realization dawns that everything on screen is being fed through Fausta’s traumatically formed perceptions; the film is completely subjective. This also serves to undercut what might initially be perceived as self-conscious “quirk” rather than character-created ambivalence. Fausta’s fear of men is so absolute that she avoids interaction with them at all costs, her blank gaze is a means of protection through camouflage. She shrinks from the scene, and it’s no wonder when you consider the perceptions she carries with her. Aside from her uncle and a father-surrogate gardener at the home of a wealthy pianist who employs her, Fausta’s single interaction with a man in the film is at her cousin’s wedding, when he approaches her and asks her to bathe him in her menstruation. Later, after the party, all of the sleeping people are arranged around the house so that they evoke the aftermath of a massacre. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s not what we’re seeing, because it’s still what we’re thinking.

Perpetua and Fausta have developed an interior world on their own together to ward off these horrors. They sing so they don’t have to talk about it. Superstitious solutions are prescribed to avoid further horrors, and to avoid confronting them. Pathologies become the new baseline mode of engaging the world and fear becomes the lens through which it’s viewed. This fear, which is, according to yet another ingrained superstition, communicated from mothers who’ve experienced the horrors of the conflict, through their breast milk, is itself a convenient explanation to a very present problem that renders it unsolvable, and thus saves everyone the trouble – the explanation of this fear is itself symptomatic of another fear. Swirling anxieties, miscommunications and discomfort create cycling environments of futility, and this film captures the nonverbal way that they perpetuate themselves. The most intense measure of protection Fausta takes, despite repeated assurances from everyone around her that these are more peaceful times she lives in, is to insert a potato in her vagina as a means of preventing rape. Periodically, she has to trim the roots that continue to grow and extend from it. She has an increasing number of nosebleeds and collapses – the solutions she’s inferred from her mother’s traumas are actually destroying her.

Fausta clings to the walls of her town as she walks through it in order to not be grabbed by the lost souls which hang out in the middle of the street, which she believes grabbed her brother, resulting in his death. Her explanation of what her brother went through, “he was thin as a skeleton, he had stomach aches,” doesn’t suggest anything other than a serious illness, but this explanation renders the death incomprehensible, and thus not worth engaging, at the same time as it gives Fausta the opportunity to guarantee that she’ll avoid it through compulsive actions. After her first collapse, she whimsically folds her doctor’s prescription into a paper crane and drops it in a bucket of water. Her affectation is self-deceiving, and ultimately self-destructive.

The thrust of the movie is in Fausta’s efforts to adjust to her new, motherless life; she needs to take the body back to her old village to bury it. Burying the body is figuring out what to do with her life, figuring out how to have a place in the world, burying her old fears and moving on. It’s about the destruction of one worldview for the sake of creating a better one. At the end of the film, a couple of kids playing on the top of a set of stairs in are framed against a hillside in the distance, the word “acion” is written into it, looming over the village. It’s a remnant of a horrible and violent past, a tag line for a campaign of violence, but it’s also a directive for the future, and an optimistic view of what needs to be done in order to move forward.

by Andrei Alupului