The Price of Milk

The Price of Milk is a movie that can only be viewed on its own terms. Strange things happen, sometimes revolving around a curse (moral: drive carefully), sometimes just because. There's a quilt, there are cows, and there's New Zealand mysticism (or something). Realism isn't the point.

A coherent plot is hiding in there somewhere, but the movie is as much a collection of unexpected events as it is aanything else. This is at first charming and cute; an early scene with Rob and Lucinda sharing a bath, for example, is particularly clever.

The amusement level is high at first, but eventually the movie just gets tiring. After a certain point, I started to wish that they would just get on with it and stop throwing in so many additional complications. Fortunately the producers came to their senses somewhere along the line, as the movie is short enough that it doesn't wear out its welcome completely by the end.

The Price of Milk (2000), written and directed by Harry Sinclair, is a film about love and magic, set in New Zealand farming country.

Danielle Cormack plays Lucinda, a beautiful young woman living on a dairy farm with her lover, Rob (Karl Urban). For reasons not totally clear, Lucinda takes the advice of her friend Drosophila (Willa O'Neill) and does some truly hateful things to determine whether Rob really loves her. (The friend's name is a joke--Drosophila is the Latin word for fruit fly.)

The film is very strange. Apparently, the actors and director hung out on the set and made up dialog and action as they went along. Maori characters appear and disappear, and one of them is a (sort of) kindly witch. This type of effort can be charming, but in this case it didn't work--at least not for me.

"The Price of Milk" had some definite strengths. Danielle Cormack is a sophisticated movie star, but she's able to convince us that she's a simple farm girl who enjoys taking a bath in milk. The scenery is lush and green. The movie is true to itself--it never steps back and says, "OK, now the magical part is over and we get real." There's an Indian wedding ceremony, and an agoraphobic dog that walks around covered by a carton. (How bad can a movie be when an agoraphobic dog is a member of the supporting cast?)

This movie is worth seeing if you run across it. I don't think it's worth seeking out. Incidentally, we saw this film on DVD. The New Zealand scenery would probably be even more beautiful on a large screen.

This movie is a fairy tale in the same vein as Alice In Wonderland: extremely psychadelic and not interpretable -- so don't even bother trying to interpret it, there's no point. You drop down a rabbit-hole and life makes no sense anymore. Just sit back and enjoy the wierdness.

Not altogether a bad film, it is definitely unique. A disjointed story line makes this film hard to watch in one go (I watched the DVD release). I did however find myself coming back to watch more and more of the movie over a period of a few days.

The film is at least saved by the often visually stunning imagery and general views of the New Zealand(?) countryside (I'd own the film for that detail alone) if not the quality of the acting from the main characters (if you ignore the often very fantastical story line).

Watch this film on a slow and lazy day.

This movie is definitely the strangest I've seen in a long time. But it made me laugh. A lot. In a slightly ironic matter (as in, oh my god, what an art school movie). I'm not sure if that was the original intent of the writer/director, but I enjoyed it. On the downside, it can get a bit long sometimes and I think could have been edited a little better, i.e., cutting short some scenes, and at times Lucinda's character seems unrealistic and even downright stupid. But the payoff is some hilariously absurd scenes and concepts--my favorite was the dog in the box. I'd recommend this movie, but don't go into it expecting something breathtaking. It's first and foremost absurdist.