Shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize in 2016, the book Hot Milk by Deborah Levy has now been adapted in a movie written and directed by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, in competition at Berlinale 75. The two main characters are British, but we find them travelling to Almería, Spain: Sofia (Emma Mackey) takes to a clinic her mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), who is hoping for a cure to walk again. The woman’s mobility problem appears to be physical, but perhaps is psychosomatic; the daughter also suffers the consequences of it, and her impatience with her mother grows as she struggles to care for her properly.
Caring for sick loved ones can be exhausting, but the burden Sofia bears also invades her nightmares: sometimes she imagines being stuck in a wheelchair like Rose, and perhaps even the pain caused by jellyfish stinging her in the water is a way of making her body feel very strong sensations, as a reaction. Compared to the novel, Rose is portrayed as a more negative person: irritating, intrusive, suffocating, as if to justify the psychological suffering of Sofia, the daughter without independence. These sharper characterisations cause a partial lost of that feeling of ambivalence present in the relationship between those who are ill and those who care for them: love and hate that can coexist. A narrative simplification that makes the mother/daughter relationship too ordinary, as if the real personalities of the two women do not have time to emerge before the abrupt end of the film.
“Hot Milk” by Rebecca Lenkiewicz
There is an opposite situation in another film in competition, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: Linda (Rose Byrne) takes care of a seriously ill daughter, while her husband is away, her flat becomes not fit to live in and her job as a psychoanalyst creates further tensions for her. Sometimes the mental distress of those who have to deal with stressful situations is hardly visible: the director has chosen to frame the protagonist very often in close-ups (while the child always remains off-screen; we only hear her voice) as if to ensure that nothing of her suffering can be hidden from us.
Linda is not a bad mother, nor a bad psychoanalyst, nor a bad wife, nor a bad woman: if she behaves in neurotic, sometimes almost indefensible ways, it is because she no longer knows how to deal with the continous growth of problems in her life. She is clearly imperfect, and the directorial style of Bronstein that never gives her a break seems an advice of never judging her behaviour. There is no courage in pretending that everything is fine and under control: admitting that she is a mother and a woman who suffers is the best path the character must take in order not to ruin her life, for herself and especially for those she loves.
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” by Mary Bronstein
A film in the Panorama program gives such a many-sided portrait of the home care topic that it was also able to be entertaining. Olmo, directed by Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke, is set in New Mexico at the end of the 1970s: Olmo (Aivan Uttapa) is also the name of the 14-year-old protagonist from a Hispanic family, whose father has paralysed limbs due to multiple sclerosis. The care of such seriously ill patients, fifty years ago, was not comparable to today’s: indeed the names of some doctors consulted to make the movie credible appear in the credits (such accuracy can also be found in the costume and production design). Olmo’s father has to spend his days at home and suffers from his complete dependence on his wife, eldest daughter and sometimes on the too-young son: family fights are frequent.
Yet Eimbcke decides to tell the story of a realistic family (extended to include Olmo’s best friend) in which deep affection and regular fights smoothly coexist as part of a daily routine, just as in almost any other family. For this reason, caring for a sick man also results in funny sequences (in which actor Gustavo Sánchez Parra, playing someone who is always immobilised, acts only with his face, entrusting his body completely to his colleagues). In a broader way, this is a story of a teenager collecting new experiences; Olmo not only comes to terms with his age, but also with his origins (the children speak English, the parents Spanish). The physical weakness of a parent who maintains a strong personality anyway is an important component in Olmo’s personal developement: instead of paternal authority, there is filial empowerment; youthful rebellion ends with an act of love that everyday difficulties turn from ordinary to special.
“How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World” di Florian Pochlatko
Moving on to the new Perspectives section for first feature films, an Austrian movie takes on the point of view of someone suffering from a mental illness. In How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World, directed by Florian Pochlatko, the young protagonist Pia (Luisa-Céline Gaffro) recounts her return to her family household after being discharged from a psychiatric hospital. Her narrative can’t be linear: we can see, coexisting in the frames, both the real and the imaginary world of a girl who frequently passes from the enthusiastic excess of her fantasies to the meltdowns of her neuroses.
In addition to the skillful acting of Gaffro whose character slowly loses control without realising it, but at the same time making it evident to the viewers, the performances of the two parents who have to play a double role are noteworthy too: the real people, and the imaginary versions created by Pia’s mind as if they were the protagonists of a film shot in her head. Without concealing the family suffering caused by illnesses of the mind and the difficulties of social reintegration of the former patients, a certain richness of hyperactive minds is also highlighted: the very kind of minds that, when not caged or badly treated, often produce great art.
