Rebecca Lenkiewicz has adapted Deborah Levy's novel Hot Milk—a Booker Prize finalist in 2016—into a film of the same name, now in competition at the 75th Berlinale. The original title carries weight: it invokes something nourishing that has curdled. Two British women find themselves in Almería, Spain. Sofia (Emma Mackey) has brought her mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) to a clinic, hoping a cure will restore her ability to walk. Rose's paralysis presents as physical, though it may be psychosomatic. The real toll falls on Sofia, whose resentment grows in step with the exhaustion of caring for her adequately.
Caring for an ill family member is grueling work. For Sofia, the weight of it invades even her nightmares: she imagines herself trapped in Rose's wheelchair, and perhaps the sting of jellyfish in the water is a way of making her body feel something, anything, intensely. Lenkiewicz's film portrays Rose more harshly than the novel does—irritating, intrusive, suffocating—as if to justify Sofia's psychological suffering, her dependence masquerading as duty. This sharpening of character flattens the real ambivalence that haunts such relationships: the coexistence of love and hatred, attraction and revulsion. The narrative simplifies what it should complicate. Mother and daughter become figures rather than people, and the film ends before their true selves have time to emerge.
Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, also in competition, inverts this dynamic. Linda (Rose Byrne) cares for a gravely ill daughter while her husband is absent, her apartment becomes uninhabitable, and her work as a psychoanalyst compounds her stress. The mental anguish of someone drowning in accumulated crisis can be invisible. Bronstein films Linda almost entirely in extreme close-up—the daughter remains offscreen; we hear only her voice—as if to ensure we cannot look away from the mother's disintegration.
Linda is not a bad mother, not a bad analyst, not a bad wife, and not a bad person. Her neurotic, sometimes indefensible behavior springs from one source: she no longer knows how to manage alone the weight of everything pressing down on her. She is plainly imperfect, and the camera grants her no mercy, inviting us never to sit in judgment of her. There is no courage in pretending that all is well and under control. What matters is her willingness to admit that she is a mother and a woman who is suffering—and that admission is the only path forward, the only way to stop destroying the lives of those she loves.
A film in the Panorama sidebar succeeds in depicting home care with such nuance that it becomes funny. Olmo, directed by Mexican filmmaker Fernando Eimbcke, is set in New Mexico in the late 1970s. Olmo (Aivan Uttapa) is a fourteen-year-old boy from a Hispanic family. His father is paralyzed from multiple sclerosis. Fifty years ago, care for someone so severely disabled bore no resemblance to what is possible today. The credits acknowledge medical consultants who verified the details—and the same rigor extends to costumes and props. The father spends his days at home, tormented by his complete dependence on his wife, his elder daughter, and sometimes the too-young Olmo. Arguments erupt frequently.
Yet Eimbcke chooses to show a realistic family—enlarged to include Olmo's best friend—in which deep affection and quarrels coexist naturally, as they do in almost every household. Caring for the sick father generates moments of dark comedy. The actor Gustavo Sánchez Parra, always immobilized, acts only with his face, surrendering his body entirely to his scene partners. These moments sit within a larger story of a teenage boy coming of age—not only navigating adolescence but also his identity. His parents speak Spanish; he and his sister speak English. His father's physical weakness, paired with an unbroken will, becomes crucial to Olmo's maturation. In place of paternal authority comes filial responsibility. Adolescent rebellion resolves into an act of love made both ordinary and extraordinary by the daily struggles that surround it.
In Perspectives, a new section devoted to debut features, an Austrian film shows mental illness from the perspective of the person living it. In How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World, directed by Florian Pochlatko, a young woman named Pia (Luisa-Céline Gaffro) narrates her return home after psychiatric hospitalization. Her account cannot be linear. Real and imaginary worlds coexist onscreen, as if the film itself inhabited the mind of a girl who swings between euphoric fantasy and the collapse of her neurosis.
Gaffro's performance is arresting—she loses control without seeming to notice, yet makes it unmistakable to us. The two parents are equally skilled, performing a double role: themselves as they are, and the versions of themselves that exist in Pia's imagination, like actors in a film playing in her head. Without obscuring the family suffering caused by mental illness and the difficulty of reintegration into society, the film also conveys something else: the strange richness of hyperactive minds. When they are not confined or mishandled, such minds often create great art.
This article is also available in English.