The Milk of Sorrow Joins Growing List of Works about Peru’s Shining Path Years

A scene from the Spanish-Peruvian movie “The Milk Of Sorrow” by director Claudia Llosa in this photo released by the Berlinale film festival. (Berlinale via Associated Press)

Congratulations to Peruvian-born director Claudia Llosa, whose drama The Milk of Sorrow (La Teta Asustada) captured the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin film festival last week.

I am eager to see the film, which to my knowledge is not presently showing in Lima. If you’re curious about it, here’s a recent review from Variety:

With her sophomore effort “The Milk of Sorrow,” Peruvian director Claudia Llosa (“Madeinusa”) bolsters her reputation as one of the most interesting femme helmers working in the Americas today.

Through the story of a withdrawn contemporary maidservant in Lima, the film deals subliminally but forcefully with the wartime traumas of many Peruvian women (who are said to have passed their traumas on to their daughters through breastfeeding, hence the title). Ultra-arthouse item, which copped the Golden Bear at Berlin, should find many champions as well as a few naysayers, and will need passionate support wherever it goes. It bowed in Spain Feb. 13.

At first, the pic seems a slow-moving, particularly well-framed ethnographic study of life in the big city in Peru; it only gradually becomes clear that Llosa’s second feature perfectly aligns form and content. The film never shows the crimes committed against women before the 1990 regime change, though the violence, rape and torture they suffered inform every frame. By keeping them offscreen, Llosa underlines the fact they are unspeakable crimes, not even talked about today — though their aftermath is still felt even after the women directly concerned have passed away.

Beautiful but aloof local girl Fausta (Magaly Solier, also the protag of “Madeinusa”) finds herself at the deathbed of her mother (Barbara Lazon). Fausta suffers from what the locals call “the frightened breast” (pic’s literal Spanish title), having inherited her mother’s wartime distress through nursing.

Paralyzed with fear, the girl has inserted a potato in her intimate parts to protect herself from the same fate as her mother. As in “Madeinusa,” Peruvian realities and Llosa’s light magical realism mesh to create a vivid picture of a society and its problems. Things that might seem strange in any other context feel perfectly normal here.

The only allusions to the past of Fausta’s mother are heard in the gruesome song she sings just before her death. But music will also provide Fausta with a means of escape and reconciliation, as she finds a job as a maid for an occasionally tempestuous pianist, Aida (Susi Sanchez), who takes a liking to Fausta’s own improvised songs.

Though Fausta and her kind uncle (Marino Ballon) come from a poor background and practically live in a slum, the film finds beauty and even humor in their world. Llosa insists on marriage and natural death as normal parts of the cycle of life — and as a contrast to the chaos that preceded the period in which the pic is set.

Solier’s largely passive performance makes sense in context, though it will turn some people against an already sober film. Technically, “The Milk of Sorrow” is a treat, starting with Natasha Braier’s composed lensing and Frank Gutierrez’s languid but precise editing rhythm. Warm-blooded guitar score is a nice touch, but unaccompanied songs sung by the protags are the true key to the drama.

Llosa’s film follows on the heels of a growing trend in art and literature to explore the brutal events of the Shining Path era of the 1980s and ’90s. Nearly 70,000 Peruvians died or disappeared between 1980 and 2000 as a result of the armed conflict between Maoist Shining Path guerillas and Peru’s military. 

Some notable books in English and artworks that address the Shining Path conflict and its legacy include:

• Peruvin-born Fiction writer Daniel Alarcon’s wonderful short story collection War by Candlelight (2005);
• Dutch-born sculptor Lika Mutal’s stone memorial El Ojo Que Llora (The Eye that Cries), which honors the 70,000 victims of the internal war. (The Lima-based work was vandalized by Fujimori supporters in 2007);

The Eye that Cries, by Lika Mutal / photo by Santiago Stucchi

• Nicholas Shakespeare’s 2002 novel The Dancer Upstairs, which is based on the events that led to the capture of Abimael Guzman, the leader of the Shining Path movement;
•  Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto, based on the 1996 Tupac Amaru takeover of the Japanese ambassadorial residence in Lima;
• Chilean artist Iván Navarro’s ‘Holeway’ series 9007) includes an optical-illusion sculpture titled “Sendero Luminoso”; one critic notes that in this word “escape is suggested, but not possible; there is a menacing tone to [Navarro’s] funhouse allusion”;
• Artists working in traditional crafts media have begun to depict events from the Shining Path conflict in three-dimensional retablos.

Retablo by Nicario Jimenez depicting indigenous people caught in violent conflict between Shining Path and state forces

I’m sure that there are many more intriguing works of art, film and literature that explore the Shining Path years. Can readers recommend any others?

Further Reading:

“Sendero Luminoso and the Trauma of Peru,” from gci275, for a history of SL through 2003