Milk of Sorrow and Gardens, Part III

The wall and gates, however, limit this garden to only the rich white colonizers and lock out Fausta’s indigenous family members and their impoverished community. As if responding to this exploitation, Fausta’s nose bleeds when she encounters her mistress Aida. In her servant’s alcove, she sings to hide her fear as she cuts off potato growth. The estate garden seems to usurp her own inner garden in this scene. Yet, when Fausta encounters and joins forces with the estate gardener, Noé (Efraín Solís), she discovers a way to bridge her community’s constructed garden and her own inner garden with the fecundity of Aida’s oasis. An initial connection occurs when shots of a colorful wedding in the desolate Lima hills are juxtaposed with images of a shattered piano disrupting Aida’s garden. In Lima’s desolate landscape, ornate clothing and violet tents transform into flowers erupting out of the desert. But Aida’s paradise is disrupted by the broken piano thrust from a window into the foliage below. In both scenes, the garden and machine merge, highlighting the similarity between the two spaces.

But it is Fausta’s relationship with Noé that moves her to a middle place that allows both human and nonhuman nature to blossom. Aida and her garden highlight the war and exploitation Fausta and her mother attempt to escape in Lima. Fausta’s uncle’s family shows us an artificial garden built for the colonized. But Noé and Fausta integrate nonhuman nature in the wasteland outside Aida’s walls. Although Aida claims watering her garden “calms her,” she exploits Fausta, stealing her mermaid song and breaking a promise to give Fausta the pearls they collect from a broken necklace. She remains locked away, even throwing Fausta out of her car after a concert. Noé on the other hand, offers her comfort and security, not only by escorting her home (from a distance) but by teaching her to cultivate plants, a skill she gained first from a village vegetable garden before their forced move to Lima. As Noé explains, “plants tell the truth about people,” and the flowers she chooses tell him she needs comforting. Together they burn the piano, as if resisting the machine. And instead of “bleeding roses” from her nose, Fausta holds a gardenia in her mouth. When she asks him why he plants everything but potatoes in the garden, Noé explains that potatoes are cheap and flourish little.

When Fausta finally begs to have the potato removed, she and Noé gain access to that more verdant middle place. After stealing back the pearls she earned, Fausta faints at the estate gate where Noé finds her and carries her to the clinic for the removal. With the pearls in her possession, Fausta can transport her mother away from Lima and reunite her with the natural world she was forced to leave behind. In a dramatic turn, Fausta carries her mother across a beach and leaves her close to the ocean where she sings as the sea takes her mother home. Fausta has now become part of a larger biotic community, a middle place where thriving traditional parks, bright-colored constructed gardens, and her own potato can thrive. As a symbol of this middle place, Noé leaves a flower on her porch, a blooming potato plant.

Milk of Sorrow and Gardens, Part III

The wall and gates, however, limit this garden to only the rich white colonizers and lock out Fausta’s indigenous family members and their impoverished community. As if responding to this exploitation, Fausta’s nose bleeds when she encounters her mistress Aida. In her servant’s alcove, she sings to hide her fear as she cuts off potato growth. The estate garden seems to usurp her own inner garden in this scene. Yet, when Fausta encounters and joins forces with the estate gardener, Noé (Efraín Solís), she discovers a way to bridge her community’s constructed garden and her own inner garden with the fecundity of Aida’s oasis. An initial connection occurs when shots of a colorful wedding in the desolate Lima hills are juxtaposed with images of a shattered piano disrupting Aida’s garden. In Lima’s desolate landscape, ornate clothing and violet tents transform into flowers erupting out of the desert. But Aida’s paradise is disrupted by the broken piano thrust from a window into the foliage below. In both scenes, the garden and machine merge, highlighting the similarity between the two spaces.

But it is Fausta’s relationship with Noé that moves her to a middle place that allows both human and nonhuman nature to blossom. Aida and her garden highlight the war and exploitation Fausta and her mother attempt to escape in Lima. Fausta’s uncle’s family shows us an artificial garden built for the colonized. But Noé and Fausta integrate nonhuman nature in the wasteland outside Aida’s walls. Although Aida claims watering her garden “calms her,” she exploits Fausta, stealing her mermaid song and breaking a promise to give Fausta the pearls they collect from a broken necklace. She remains locked away, even throwing Fausta out of her car after a concert. Noé on the other hand, offers her comfort and security, not only by escorting her home (from a distance) but by teaching her to cultivate plants, a skill she gained first from a village vegetable garden before their forced move to Lima. As Noé explains, “plants tell the truth about people,” and the flowers she chooses tell him she needs comforting. Together they burn the piano, as if resisting the machine. And instead of “bleeding roses” from her nose, Fausta holds a gardenia in her mouth. When she asks him why he plants everything but potatoes in the garden, Noé explains that potatoes are cheap and flourish little.

When Fausta finally begs to have the potato removed, she and Noé gain access to that more verdant middle place. After stealing back the pearls she earned, Fausta faints at the estate gate where Noé finds her and carries her to the clinic for the removal. With the pearls in her possession, Fausta can transport her mother away from Lima and reunite her with the natural world she was forced to leave behind. In a dramatic turn, Fausta carries her mother across a beach and leaves her close to the ocean where she sings as the sea takes her mother home. Fausta has now become part of a larger biotic community, a middle place where thriving traditional parks, bright-colored constructed gardens, and her own potato can thrive. As a symbol of this middle place, Noé leaves a flower on her porch, a blooming potato plant.

Milk of Sorrow and the Garden Part II

A doctor’s visit to treat the bloody nose broaches a second garden, a vining potato Fausta has inserted to shield her from men and the trauma her mother suffered. The uncle insists they are there only to treat her chronic bleeding and fainting episodes, and claims they are a product of her “milk of sorrow,” a horrific side effect of the terrorism into which Fausta was born. But the doctor notes only the potato, which has now inflamed Fausta’s vagina. If the potato grows, the doctor explains, roots will protrude. The uncle worries about harvesting potatoes and insists Fausta’s only ailment is the milk of sorrow. And Fausta argues the potato is not meant as a contraceptive but as a rape deterrent. Fausta is becoming a garden, but to avoid infection, the potato should be removed. Then Fausta can escape the trauma of her mother’s rape and death and consequently more effectively represent a middle place like that Adamson asserts.

Fausta’s attempt to bury her mother in her home village outside Lima reveals the third garden in the film: a traditional imperialist garden behind enormous gates walling out Lima and the arid mountains surrounding it. When her uncle gives Fausta only until his daughter’s wedding to bury her mother in her village, Fausta must find funds to transport the corpse. As New York Timescritic Jeannette Catsoulis explains, the film “explores the possibility of female empowerment in a culture suffocated by superstition and poverty.” If she fails to collect the needed money, Fausta’s mother will be buried in the backyard, in a grave her uncle transforms into a makeshift swimming pool. After investigating alternatives, including taking the body on a bus, Fausta accepts a job as a servant for a wealthy musician. When Fausta enters the estate, she leaves the noise and desolation of Lima behind her. Inside the estate’s gates is a green paradise full of trees and flowers. This literal garden aligns with a parting song Fausta sang to her mother’s corpse as they preserved it. For Fausta, her mother will be “picking flowers in heaven.” In the estate garden, Fausta can pick them on Earth.

The Milk of Sorrow and the Power of the Garden, Part 1

Directed by Claudia Llosa, the Peruvian drama The Milk of Sorrow (2009) illustrates at least three versions of the garden growing out of classism, racism, and a bloody civil war. Centered on young daughter Fausta’s (Magaly Solier) struggle to cope with her mother’s death and the memories of war she leaves behind, The Milk of Sorrow draws on musical and visual poetry of gardens to reveal conflicts between Fausta’s impoverished indigenous Lima, Peru community and the white upper-class inner-city fortress where she works as a servant. 

Ultimately, Fausta reconciles these conflicting views, negotiating a solution that promotes a middle ground like that Adamson proposes. The brightly colored artificial garden Fausta’s family creates may contrast greatly with the walled paradise inside Fausta’s employer Aida’s (Susi Sánchez) gates, but the garden growing inside Fausta (both literally and figuratively) serves as a bridge between their conflicting ideologies.

The first “garden” introduced in the film breaks the mournful singing and tragic death that open the film. Fausta’s mother shares her terrifying story on her deathbed, singing of the rapes she endured during Peru’s dirty war between Maoist guerrillas and government security forces in the 1980s and the cursed outcome for Fausta. Fausta has fed on her mother’s “milk of sorrow” and must feel her trauma even after her mother’s death. As critic Rick Vecchio explains, “tens of thousands of Andean Indians did flee to Lima in the 1980s and 1990s to escape political violence… [and] helped to shape the rich tapestry of Peru’s culture and form the character of its society.” 

When Fausta’s mother passes “like a dead bird,” however, the film reveals the colorful constructed garden outside Fausta’s uncle’s house. Although surrounded by barren mountains, Fausta’s cousin is trying on a wedding dress in their dusty yard, and the brightly dressed family sits around an outdoor table looking like flowers bursting out of the desert hills of their blue painted barrio. When Fausta appears, her nose begins to bleed, and a close-up of the blood seems to bud like a rose.This first garden provides color that combats the colorless traumas of war and gender and racial oppression.

Embarras Valley Film Festival Winners!

Documentary Film and Video Award Winners

First Place: Emily McNeill, Artist in Progress

Artist on Vimeo

Second Place: Miller Bradford, Submersion 

Submersion on YouTube

Fictional Film and Video Award Winners:

First Place: Ashley Cai, Hermes

Second Place: Alyce Rogers, Adam