Hot Milk Rebecca Lenkiewicz (UK; Gr; 2025)
Hot Milk Rebecca Lenkiewicz (UK; Gr; 2025) Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps
viewed 8th July 2025 Tyneside Cinema; ticket £13.25
low fat milk
Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s ‘Hot Milk’ is a film of a novel of the same name by Deborah Levy which I haven’t read. So ‘Hot Milk’ (HM)? As a child when ill with a sore throat or similar a cup of hot milk was sometimes prescibed by mother as a comforting restorative. The heating of the milk giving it a thickened sort of sweetness that caressed the gullet soothed the tonsils on its way down. Checking out the phrase with the ‘know-all’ it has a couple of slang meanings: street wise it means ‘come’ as in ejac; in jazz, hot milk refs a hot lick, and in Urdu apparently it means: being over emotional. That’s as far as I got without feeling I’d got anywhere. There’s some hanky-panky in HM, the sound track is tasteful modernist and emotions are by and large kept in check by Lenkiewicz, but allowed the occasional release of steam. So maybe I missed something but the reason for all the trouble about the title is that I struggled to relate to the film and kept coming back to the title as perhaps offering some pointer.
It didn’t.
‘Hot Milk’ has an eliptical structure intercutting different physicalities and contrasting states of mind. It interweaves states of dominance subjection loss dependance disablity sexuality frailty aency incest set against visuals that celebrate watery aqueous images of the body and the heat of the sun fanned desire that contrast with the contained atmosphere of the interior images and the constrained ‘carer’ relationship between daughter and mum who makes a claim on being disabled.
At the end of the movie Hot Milk felt similar to a meal comprising one of those taster menus you get at fancy expensively designed restaurants. In the taster menue they’re lots of natty little dishes that one after the other are served to the table. Each dish looks wonderful but they tend to cancel each other out. So you get black pudding with piquant gooseberry sauce, thinly drilled swede filled with an avocado mix etcetera so likemise with Hot Milk we are presented with a series of little scenes the roll on one after another: trysts with a lover, watery swimming images, scenes in the clinic etcetera. Like the refined setting of the taster meal they are enveloped in a carapace of fine art cinematography and a sparse finely wrought sound track. A lot of people like the expensively fashioned taster experience. Others prefer a straightforward plate of food.
After seeing HM like dining on the taster meal you still feel hungrey afterwards. Having spent an hour and half watching HM as a pleasantly contrived assemblage of images there is feeling of having an experience that is self consciously artsy, vacuous and insubstantial.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk