Hot Milk’s mother-daughter meltdown or losers on the lash in The Inbetweeners Movie, some films leave us feeling as foolish as their protagonists for trying to escape reality
A
s we near the end of a hot, dry August, I’m longing for a Mediterranean getaway; salt-crisp skin, a Fanta lemon, and a tinge of pink across my shoulders. I’m also thinking about what I like to call “sunburn cinema” – homegrown films like recent release Hot Milk (adapted from Deborah Levy’s novel), which remind us we’re a nation uniquely ill-equipped to deal with the sun. Or, as one popular Letterboxd review puts it: “Oh no, the Brits are on trauma vacation again”.
Sunburn is the hallmark of a particular kind of Brit abroad, visual evidence of the lack of decorum that we notoriously display across the resorts and beach towns of Europe. Sunburn cinema, however, pinpoints what makes us inclined to chaos and self-sabotage.
Hot Milk, for example, sees mother and daughter Rose (Fiona Shaw) and Sofia (Emma Mackey) seek answers for Rose’s undiagnosed pain at a mysterious Spanish clinic, making a sad holiday out of a desperate last ditch effort to improve their lives. Things quickly go off the rails, and Sofia kicks out by indulging in all the idiosyncrasies of the British way of holidaying: boozing, broiling, and sleeping around. Ultimately both mother and daughter’s hopes curdle in the heat, leaving the viewer feeling as burned and foolish as its protagonists.
