There can be no more beautifully shot or perfectly framed film out in London at the moment than Claudia Liosa’s allegorical tale. It’s probably best understood as a Peruvian version of magic realism. Which is just as well, since its story concerns a young woman who inserts a potato into herself to avoid the danger of being raped.
She is Fausta, impressively played with studied grace by Magaly Solier. She has performed this act after her dying mother has told us that, during Peru’s period of guerrilla warfare in the Eighties and Nineties, she was raped and left for dead.
According to local belief, Fausta has suffered from drinking her mother’s breast milk, which renders her psychologically and physically ill. Hence the title of a film which combines realism with a kind of poetic allegory that is difficult to forget.
Despite the doctor’s advice, Fausta insists on leaving the potato where it is as she helps out with her uncle’s wedding business and goes to work for a white, middle-class former concert pianist to save enough money to bury her mother. Nothing will alter her feeling that the world is a dangerous place.
The film, made in the striking, sun-bleached Peruvian countryside outside Lima, quietly shows us both local life and Fausta’s inability to connect with it — though consumerism and a kind of democracy have replaced the violence of her mother’s days.
It is filled with Quechua chanting, peasant music and superbly natural performances from its cast. This is Liosa’s second film and, if it could be accused of a certain exoticism, there is no doubt that there is a haunting resonance in almost every frame.
The Milk Of Sorrow (La Teta Asustada)
Cert: 12A
