FAIRY TALES DON’T get the respect they used to from kids or academics, so New Zealand’s Harry Sinclair here attempts to stage such a story in the present-day setting of his country’s rolling green cow pastures. There, golden-haired Lucinda (Danielle Cormack) is goaded into testing the love of her dairy farming beau, Rob (Karl Urban), with predictably disastrous results. Even though guns are fired, cars get crashed, and a menacing band of golf-loving Maori goons populate the film, no one gets hurt in The Price of Milk. Everything’s given a cheerfully unreal, whimsical spin as cause and consequence go out the window in favor of Alice in Wonderland-style dream logic. Call it Kiwi magical realism.
THE PRICE OF MILK
written and directed by Harry Sinclair with Danielle Cormack, Karl Urban, and Willa O’Neill opens April 6 at Broadway Market
Sinclair fills his story with color, perhaps too much, but those predisposed to such cuteness will find much to like and amuse: An agoraphobic dog uses a cardboard box as his carapace; Lucinda and Rob do their dishes while bathing in a coal-heated outdoor tub; mysterious unseen elves called “the Jacksons” leave tiny footprints in the sand; Lucinda’s best friend (Willa O’Neill of An Angel at My Table) is named Drosophilia. In one striking shot, the train of Lucinda’s ruby red Hindu wedding dress trails endlessly across an emerald hillside.
Who’s she marrying? Milk externalizes Lucinda’s unresolved anxiety about nuptials and kids, while milk itself recurs as an image connoting fertility and the organic life force. As with all fairy tales, there’s a serious subtext to Milk, which the movie thankfully never belabors. (Its score explicitly recalls orchestrations like Peer Gynt or Hansel and Gretel.)
“Why don’t you look where you’re going?” Lucinda is reproached by an oddly resilient pedestrian (Rangi Motu), who may or may not be a witch. It’s a question our heroine has cause to wonder as her path corkscrews between reality and fantasy. Yet while tramping through the fields in a pink dress and Wellingtons, her conflicts inevitably lead to an appropriately cheerful, fanciful resolution.
