Oh, Such Sweet Sorrow

by John Villeneuve

Winner of the Golden Bear at the recent Berlin Film Festival, The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada) is Peru’s offering to this years Academy Awards. And what a gift it is. What lurks in the margins of this film is the conflict in the 1980’s between the vicious and radical left-wing party (The Shining Path) and the ruling Popular Action Party who employed militias to quash the communist threat. Caught in the middle of these two lawless regimes were the peasants, most of whom were Incas. It is estimated that by the end of the conflict close to 70,000 people were slaughtered, again, most of whom were Incas. Murder, torture and rape were everyday occurrences, and an all too familiar legacy of ongoing conflicts throughout the world even today.

At the heart of this story is Fausta (Magaly Solier), a young Inca woman dealing with the ghosts of a violent past. From the opening scene we learn, through a shared history told in aching song, that Fausta’s dying mother was a victim of rape during that horrible decade. And the sufferers of that sexual violence passed on a disease of melancholia to their children through their breast milk, known as the milk of sorrow. Fausta is a inheritor of this disease. Not only is she suffering from crippling depression and fear (especially the anxiety of potential rape), but she also is afflicted by an unusual gynecological ailment. When she was a child, her mother would tell her stories about women who in order to avoid pregnancy and rape would insert a potato into their vaginas. The belief was that the act was so revolting that it would even revolt a rapist from continuing, and if he did, then at least the potato would impede fertilization. Fausta, we learn, has taken this story very seriously. Since she was a child she has had a potato inside of her which has grown, and continues to grow, and now, because of infections and bacteria, it is threatening her life.

Moments after her mother’s death, Fausta proceeds from the tiny trailer to alert her uncle and aunt, who are preparing the future wedding of their daughter. But before she can utter a word, she begins to bleed and faints on the dusty floor of this shanty town. At the hospital, the doctor informs her uncle that the potato must be removed or she could die. The uncle, believing her constant bleeding since childhood was a symptom of her “milk of sorrow” affliction, is shocked by the news. However, Fausta denies performing the gruesome act, and leaves the hospital untreated. Only through her secret thoughts do we learn that she did indeed execute the insertion.

For Fausta, the only important thing now is to bury her mother. It is her funeral arrangement plans that alert us to the extreme poverty that these Andean people endure. Like the funeral director who has only one business card which he flashes to clients but, in the end, must keep for himself. Or Fausta’s aunt, the local wedding arranger, who doesn’t worry about misspelling names on wedding cakes because nobody can read anyway. And now Fausta, who must rent a hole for her dead mother until she can afford a proper ceremony. It is this financial crises that forces her to leave her squalid town for Lima, Peru’s capital, where she has been offered a servant job to a wealthy pianist, Miss Aida (Susi Sanchez). What develops is an uneasy relationship where quaint superstition clashes with cold-hearted reality.

The Milk of Sorrow is 33 year old writer, director, Claudia Llosa’s exquisite follow-up to her first film, Madeinusa (2006). Her handling of these two divergent environments, and the mythologies that rule them, is a triumph of allegory and magic realism. Her control of her subject matter never veers off course, nor does it flirt with sentimentality. It is a powerfully sustained package that informs and delights as each layer is ripped back revealing Fausta’s blossoming individuation. In a year where women directors seem to be finally taking center stage, it is a shame that Claudia Llosa is not in the forefront because, for my money, she outdoes Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion just by the shear force of her story telling style. This unruly clash of civilizations could have easily fallen into farce or melodrama, but under Llosa’s steady hand what emerges is a poetic yearning that stirs the mournful soul in us all.

Credit must also be given to Natasha Braier (En la ciudad de Sylvia), who’s cinematography informs the themes of the film with the contradiction inherent in these two worlds. The sphere of superstition is shot in despairingly bleak tones of gray and vast emptiness, with a shock of intermittent hues, while the world of commerce is filled with color, texture, and low-lighted intimacy. In a way, Braier almost seems capable of telling this story through images alone.

But one must return to the stories’ heart, and that is Magalay Solier (Fausta) who exudes such sadness that one feels she aches for the whole world alone in silence. During one scene Aida seduces Fausta with the promise of a pearl from a broken necklace, in turn for a single song from her oral history, but Fausta declines out of fear and shyness. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, there is an instance that is breath-taking in its unexpectedness and primordial anguish. Solier handles this moment with bridled caution, never exaggerating its implications. Her gradual shedding of fear is miraculous to watch. And Susi Sanchez as Aida is a perfect foil of sense to Fausta’s sensibility. Together, they perform a tortured and delicate dance.

All in all, Claudia Llosa gives us a magical and haunting fable, a parade of warring factions that exist after the war, that is mesmerizing and transcendent to behold. When other films are being lauded as feminist breakthroughs, Llosa’s film is the real deal where all the major players are women. Moreover, the story evades the typical Hollywood cliches about women, made by women. Llosa’s tale is about self-actualization, while popular fare encompasses women validating themselves through the eyes of a man. Clearly, Llosa has no interest in that backward myth. Her eye is on evolution, not stasis. On revolution, not status quo. She is so single-minded in her narrative that the denouement overwhelms with insight and transformable beauty. Jane Campion, I am certain, would whole-heartedly approve. Thus, to say that The Milk of Sorrow deserves an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film would be a given, if not a definitive understatement.