MUBI PROGRAM NOTES: Adapting Deborah Levy’s acclaimed novel about a mother and daughter’s codependence, director Rebecca Lenkiewicz contrives a sensuous visual language in which to wrap her characters. In this exclusive essay, Thirza Wakefield unpacks the patterns and symmetries that force a souring relationship to breaking point. Read full essay here.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy’s 2016 Man Booker shortlistee, has been described as a "psychological drama". Strictly speaking, it's a psychoanalytic one – a clue-sprinkled case study, involving talk therapy, of a woman whose repressed trauma has confined her to a wheelchair for 20 years. She’s so querulous and demanding that whether she gets up [...]
Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut Hot Milk opens with a quote from artist Louise Bourgeois that captures perfectly its disquieting and enigmatic tone: “I’ve been to hell and back. And let me tell you it was wonderful.” This is slippery, subversive storytelling that’s very hard to get any firm grasp on – but that is one of its main pleasures. [...]
Miss Austen BBC One/iPlayer Ah, the joy of a new Jane Austen drama – except this one is about the real author, whose 250th anniversary is this year, and the personal letters her sister Cassandra destroyed. Still, the adaptation of Gill Hornby’s novel is every bit as swoony and whip-smart as one of the literary legend’s stories. [...]
... Ferran has spent the last few years playing ever more challenging characters on both stage and screen. One in particular is also a character-builder herself: Jane Austen. In the PBS series Miss Austen, based on Gill Hornby’s bestselling 2020 novel, Ferran plays the strong-willed and impishly observant author of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, a wonder of charisma [...]
...Because [Jane] Austen’s prose is so elegant and clear, her wit so sharp, her comedy so dry, her irony so delicious, her observations so acute, her heroines so indomitable, her novels have lived on for two centuries. They offer a vacation destination for the mind, a world in which to luxuriate. Rich in characterization, compelling in their [...]
Being cast in the mini-series “Miss Austen” began Keeley Hawes’s first venture into the Jane Austen-verse. Hawes has a résumé thick with period pieces but, perhaps surprisingly, she had never done a screen adaptation of Austen’s work — a veritable cottage industry in Britain since the late 1930s. “Of course, my husband played Mr. Darcy, so I feel like [...]
For many literary scholars, Cassandra Austen is a villainess of Miss Norris-esque proportions. After all, her deliberate burning of her sibling’s vast personal correspondence — only 160 of her approximately 3,000 letters are still intact — largely thwarted any attempt to further understand the famously elusive author. However, “Miss Austen,” itself based on Gill Hornby’s same-named piece of historical [...]
...Loosely then, Hot Milk integrates Lenkiewicz’s creative specialities: sapphic intimacy, deep-rooted generational trauma, and women’s struggle for freedom. Or, as she perceives it, “sexuality is so much about freedom,” while the question to ask about fractured family dynamics is when “you’ve got damage in the past, can you unravel that damage [or] are you just colliding and clashing against [...]