HOT MILK** - Berlin Film Festival 2025

HOT MILK is the directorial debut from screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz (IDA) based on a novel by Deborah Levy.  Fiona Shaw gives a characteristically superb performance as a narcissistic manipulative mother, Rose, who may or may not be faking her inability to walk to keep her only daughter, Sofia, captive.  Sofia is in her mid-20s and while mother and daughter do seem to have genuine affection for each other, the narrative arc of the film is seeing Sofia slowly embracing her suppressed anger at her mother's constant passive-aggressive criticism and unwillingness to embrace the very expensive medical treatment they have come to Spain for.  We are meant to read this journey to action as being mediated through Sofia's sexual awakening by Vicky Krieps' vulnerable but charismatic boutique owner. Sadly there isn't enough meat on the bones of the character development or plot in this 90 minute film that feels 120 minutes long.  In particular, the side-quest to Athens and a final dramatic showdown seem insufficiently explored or signalled.  I feel really sorry for the talented young actress Emma Mackay (Sex Education) who is let down by a film too thin for her talents, and within which the only real star turn goes to Fiona Shaw.  

HOT MILK is rated R and has a running time of 92 minutes. It had its world premiere at Berlin 2025.

CORSAGE - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 3

CORSAGE is a stunning piece of imaginative film-making from writer-director Marie Kreutzer, featuring a memorable performance from Vicky Krieps (THE PHANTOM THREAD) as the iconic Austro-Hungarian Empress Sisi.

Kreutzer's approach is to take a bold ahistorical approach to get to the emotional truth of an incredibly famous, beautiful woman, trapped in a loveless marriage and burdened by the obligations of her public role.  It is similar in approach - though bolder in its leaps of imagination - than Sofia Coppola's MARIE ANTOINETTE - far more successful than Pablo Larrain's hysterical SPENCER, though less honest in its treatment of Sisi's eating disorder.  The key difference is that in both of those movies, the central women were depicted as passive victims, whereas Krieps' Sisi is the architect of her own liberation.

The movie opens with Sisi about to turn 40 in 1870s Vienna, the mother of a teenage Crown Prince and a precocious and dutiful daughter. She is obsessed with her weight, skin and youth, starving herself and riding, fencing and doing gym exercises to maintain her figure. She doesn't want to have sex with her husband, but is also jealous of a young girl that he flirts with. At first we think she is in love with her riding instructor but then realises she just gets off on him (and her husband) looking at her adoringly. As with Princess Diana, we get the impression that she is both trapped by society's superficial and unreal expectations of her, but that she has also internalised these misogynistic expectations of beauty and turned into a narcissist. Certaintly, her treatment of her confidante and lady in waiting speaks to her putting her own happiness before that of all others. 

The wonder of Krieps performance is that Sisi never seems passive or a victim even when she is: she's actually spiky, bitchy, rebellious and wild, to the point of neglecting her duties with her indulgent cousin Ludwig of Bavaria. She's also incredibly athletic and not lying when she says she's a better rider than her instructor. It helps that Kreutzer chooses not to show us the excesses of Sisi - her absurd hair and beauty regimen - her more waspish comments about fat people - her serial infidelities. This is a much less extreme and yet more extreme Sisi - less fat-shaming and more feminist -  one more palatable to contemporary tastes. 

As to the rest of the film I love that Kreutzer shows us people in full costume dress with retinues of obsequious servants but places them in derelict locations filled with anachronistic props. It sounds too on the nose, but it actually works really well to underpin how rotten the edifice of the central European monarchy was at that stage, and the sham of these great imperial monarchs with their rotten teeth and fake beards.  Kreutzer's Sisi just takes that fakery one step further. 

CORSAGE has a running time of 113 minutes. It played Cannes, where Vicky Krieps won an acting prize. It is playing in Official Competition at the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in the USA on December 23rd and in the UK on December 24th.

PHANTOM THREAD

Where to begin with this strange slippery film?  It's genre, tone, dramatic tensions shift and evolve over its two hour running time until it becomes something quite hard to pin down? Is it a melodramatic period romance like THE BEGUILED? A Hitchcockian psychological thriller?  A generational ghost story? A fetishistic romance like THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY?  It's a film that certainly delights and repays the audience with a knowledge of film history. And yet it's something quite hermetically sealed and delicately balanced between difference style of film-making.  It's a film one can imagine quite hard to pull off without an absolute conviction in what one was creating. But in its exploration of intense emotional relationships in a tightly proscribed world, it reminded me most of all of Peter Strickland's dreamy romance.

Daniel Day-Lewis (LINCOLN), in his final role, plays Reynolds Woodcock, a 1950s fashion designer who lives and works in a grand London house, complete with royal clientele. As the film opens, he is presented as the kind of domineering, egomaniacal man surrounded by sycophantic enablers that has become vilified in the #metoo movement. He lives by strict rules all designed to give him, the self-appointed genius creator the peace he needs to create. He fears discombobulation.  And in a sense there's a delicious irony in the fact that the first of his dresses that we see is comically ugly - it's the fawning delight of his clientele  - here Gina McKee - that tells us all we need to know.

Reynolds' perfect world is curated by his devoted sister Cyril (Lesley Manville - veteran of Ken Loach films). She neatly dismisses the young girls he takes as his muses when they become tiresome, and manages the financial side of the business.  As the film opens we see her dispatch one girl only for him to speed to the country and pick up another, mostly on the grounds that she looks biddable and can remember his vast breakfast order. Both women seem at his service.  The young Alma (Vicky Krieps), takes orders from him, becomes little more than an inanimate model, and hangs on his every word.  And so the relationship might follow the typical pattern.  Alma - scraping her butter onto her toast so very loudly - might soon be dismissed.

The beauty of this story is that it subverts our expectations of who is truly in control and indeed who are the true protagonists of the film. This is the way in which it most profoundly reminded me of THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY. One thinks this is going to be a film about subservient women but actually they are firmly in control. As the film progresses we see that Cyril very much rules Reynolds - forcing him to attend a wedding to keep the House in business - daring him to pick an argument that he cannot win.  Even the seamstresses are more in control than Reynolds - he is dependent on them to bring his designs to life.  

And so the principal tension of the film is not really between Reynolds and Alma - as we shall see later - he is only feigning resistance to her. It's actually between Alma and Cyril.  The young girl knows her mind and politely but firmly brooks no objections to her plans.  She is vying with the Cyril to take control of Reynolds, and by a masterful piece of skulduggery, wins. The question is how Reynolds will take to this change in reign, and it leads to a superlative set piece at the end of the movie, where very little is said, but suspicions are noted, and accepted.  It's quite the marvel. 

The result is a film with very clear themes if subtly slippery means of getting there. Reynolds misses his dead mother terribly to the point of almost willing her ghost into existence. He craves a replacement - first Cyril and then Alma.  He is forever ravenously hungry for nourishment, and at the most basic level, Alma provides it, naming him in their opening meeting "hungry boy".  What she gets out of the relationship is the ability to express her side of the fetish.  It is no coincidence that the most passionate kiss between the two that we are allowed to see in this very coy and ambiguous film comes when the sado-masochistic relationship is finally acknowledged on both sides. 

Everything about this production is first class - from the costumes, to the interior design, to the evocation of the British sea-side and 1950s ballrooms. The acting is also superb. Daniel Day-Lewis may be getting the awards, but Manville and Krieps match him turn by turn with performances of such subtlety and brilliance. The script is also fascinating, and funnier than one often expects from Anderson. Genuinely brilliantly funny.  There was only one scene that struck a bum note - when Reynolds and Alma look through a client's deep distress and mock and punish her for her drunken escape.  This was cruel - meant to be cruel - but lessened my interest in the characters. And this is ultimately my only real criticism of the film.  All of Anderson, and his cast and crews talents, on such a self-involved, and ultimately slight story. There's something a little disappointing in that - something small - lesser than THERE WILL BE BLOOD and THE MASTER. 

PHANTOM THREAD has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong language. The film was released last year in the USA and earlier this year in Canada. It goes on release this weekend in Singapore, Australia, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, the UK and Ireland, It goes on release on February 14th in France, Denmark and Russia; on February 22nd in Brazil, Italy, Malaysia, Finland, Portugal, Sweden, Taiwan and Vietnam; on March 1st in Netherlands; on March 8th in Hong Kong and Estonia; on March 15th in Argentina; on April 13th in Norway and Turkey and on May 26th in Japan.