The Milk of Sorrow

The terrorisation of Peruvian women during the Shining Path campaigns of the 1980s is the troubling background to Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s frank, free-floating drama about the power of folk myth on young minds. As a dying woman sings of being gang raped and forced to eat the severed penis of her dead lover, we learn that her chronically demure daughter Fausta (Magaly Solier) has a potato lodged in her vagina as a crude form of contraception. Influenced by traditional songs and rituals, Faustina is repulsed by men, and the film tells of a gradual relaxing of sexual tensions within her as she attempts to bankroll her late mother’s funeral by working for a neurotic female composer. Concentrating on the implications of honouring family tradition as well as the occasional hokiness of those same traditions, Llosa sensitively captures the deep-rooted poetry of this system of beliefs while allowing us the space to assess its cultural and spiritual merits.