A cantankerous Shaw undercuts her daughter’s summer sexual awakening in this interestingly elusive adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel
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.
