Hot Milk: A heated affair, an overbearing Fiona Shaw and some shameful Irish sexuality

Irish Times

6 days ago

Rebecca Lenkiewicz is renowned for her compelling, deep-dive portrayals of marginalised women and her commitment to social justice.
Her play The Invisible, from 2015, follows a solicitor struggling to help vulnerable clients – immigrants, the poor and victims of domestic abuse – against a backdrop of austerity-driven cuts to legal aid.
Shoreditch Madonna, from a decade earlier, chronicles gentrification and predatory gender and power imbalances in east
London
. Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern, inspired by one of the last women in England to be convicted of witchcraft, excavates patriarchal power structures and the fear of female autonomy.
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Witchipedia: Ireland's most famous witches
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'I am very interested in outsiders,' Lenkiewicz says. 'I suppose I feel like I'm an outsider, although I lead a pretty settled life. I do feel like I'm looking in from somewhere. It's not a problem. I enjoy it. And I've always relished either re-creating women who have been forgotten or have been silenced. Or investigating women who are really complex.'
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Having written for and alongside such forces as
Steve McQueen
, for the Small Axe film sequence, and
Damien Chazelle
, for the TV series The Eddy, the British playwright and screenwriter makes her feature directorial debut with Hot Milk, which she adapted from the novel by
Deborah Levy
.
The story follows Sofia Papastergiadis (played with heat and flintiness by
Emma Mackey
), a twenty-something anthropology graduate who accompanies her mother, Rose (
Fiona Shaw
), to Almería in Spain, seeking treatment for Rose's mysterious paralysis.
The clinic, run by the enigmatic Dr Gómez (Vincent Perez), offers unconventional therapies that blur the lines between medical practice and psychological confrontation.
The sweltering location amplifies Sofia's erotic fixation on the free-spirited Ingrid (
Vicky Krieps
) and the simmering domestic tensions between the resentful Sofia and her overbearing mother. Ingrid and Sofia's heated affair is a distraction from the drudgery of Rose's therapy until, suddenly, both worlds collide in an unexpected way.
Lenkiewicz had agreed to adapt Levy's book if she could also direct it. 'I felt very territorial about it,' she says. 'I didn't want girls in bikinis on a beach. I wanted the sensuality and the mystery and the heat on the skin to feel very female and not seen through the male gaze.
'I found that my writing of it became very flat initially. I was being quite practical. I had to rewrite and think – just pretend I'm not directing it and give the director lots of problems.'
The blazingly sunny film was shot in the Greek region of Attica. 'We always want the landscape to feel quite edgy, not picture postcard. We wanted rocks and flint. We didn't need any help with the sun. On some days we weren't allowed to work; it was illegal because it was too hot.'
Since Hot Milk premiered at Berlin International Film Festival in February, Shaw's performance has attracted huge praise. Slight spoiler alert: her cantankerous character's paralysis is ultimately rooted in the darker aspects of Ireland's theocratic past.
'The Irish thread in the film is not in the book,' the director says. 'It was simply because of Fiona Shaw's casting. What could we use in terms of trauma? And also the whole feeling of women and shame, that our sexuality should carry some shame, carried into the themes of the story.'
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Fiona Shaw on Ireland: 'It is one of the most successful countries in the world. It wasn't when I left it'
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It's not the first time that Lenkiewicz has expressed an interest in Ireland. Her play The Night Season, set in Sligo, premiered at the British National Theatre, in London, in 2004. It follows the chaotic Kennedy family, whose lives are unsettled by the arrival of an actor playing
WB Yeats
. Lenkiewicz hadn't visited the town before writing the play.
'My father's real name was Christopher Kennedy,' Lenkiewicz says. 'And there was a notion that he was brought over on a boat by a young Irish mother. We don't know if that's true, but I've certainly always felt that there was some Irish blood in me. I don't feel spectacularly English.'
The boat story is one chapter in a romantic-sounding personal history. Born in 1968 in Plymouth, in southwestern England, Rebecca is the daughter of Celia Mills and Peter Quint, a playwright. Her stepfather is the artist Robert Lenkiewicz, who was known for his controversial public art and social projects in the English naval city.
'We were the reverse of most families, as in, if you said you wanted to be a doctor or work in a bank, there was outrage,' Lenkiewicz, who has four siblings, says. 'You had to be an artist. It was kind of a pressure. To this day, I still think, Am I doing this under duress, because it was expected of me or it was a way of impressing one's parent?
'Not my mum. She would have been happy with whatever I did. But my father was very much of the opinion that if you're not an artist then who are you? I don't believe that in any way, but these things go into your skin as a child.'
Lenkiewicz has acted at both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. That experience certainly tells in Hot Milk, an emotionally fraught film that is easily identified as the work of an actor's director.
'I trusted the actors implicitly, and they trusted me,' she says. 'I think, having acted, I know how much it takes for actors. It's not about telling them what to do; it's about giving them a space.
'That wasn't just down to me. We had an amazing cinematographer in Christopher Blauvelt. He was so helpful, especially for those intimate scenes. It's about creating an environment where actors feel safe, so that they can be as dangerous or bold as they want to be.
'I suppose, because I have experience of the acting process myself, I can recognise if someone feels scared or stuck. But none of my cast did seem to get scared or stuck. They were all just flying even before the camera started rolling.'
Lenkiewicz began her writing career in the early 2000s. Her debut play, Soho: A Tale of Table Dancers, inspired by her own brief time as a table dancer, won a Fringe First award at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2000. Her Naked Skin, from 2008, about suffragettes in the early 20th century, became the first original play by a living woman writer to be produced on the Olivier stage, in the largest of the three auditoriums at the National Theatre.
'I'm very proud of it, and I had a great time doing it,' Lenkiewicz says. 'But the National waved it like a flag. And I thought, That is something you'd want to put under a carpet: for 40 years there hasn't been a female writer on the Olivier stage with an original play; that's absolutely despicable.
'Thankfully, things have shifted a lot in the theatre. But there's still redressing to be done, in theatre and film, in terms of female directors and writers.'
As a screenwriter, Lenkiewicz wrote the 2013 film Ida with Pawl Pawlikowski, which won the Oscar for best foreign language film. She also worked with Sebastián Lelio on Disobedience, from 2017, and with Wash Westmoreland on Colette, from the following year, contributing sharp dialogue and emotional depth. Those collaborations make for quite the film school.
'Ida was my first film. I remember Pawel saying, 'Keep it simple.' I've remembered that ever since. I've had brilliant input from the directors I have worked with. But I think in the end you're on your own with everything you have absorbed, from your family upbringing to conversations you've had.'
Hot Milk is in cinemas from Friday, July 4th