‘Black Milk’ Is a Feminist Saga About a Woman Who Repels Bad Men With Black Breast Milk
BERLIN—A culture-clash movie with an erotic subplot, there’s little doubt that Uisenma Borchu’s Black Milk (which premiered on Friday at the Berlin Film Festival), the Mongolian-German director’s second feature, is an intensely personal project. Borchu emigrated from Mongolia to Germany with her family at the age of four and plays the central role of Wessi, a woman who returns as an adult to her homeland to explore her Mongolian identity and reestablish a relationship with her sister Ossi.
Upon her arrival at an austere, but certainly picturesque, home on the steppe, Wessi enjoys a warm reception from her family and neighbors. There’s a genuine conviviality shared by these hard-working nomads. Rather wistfully, Wessi’s father seems confident that her long exile in Germany hasn’t alienated her from her people’s customs.
In some respects, Black Milk, despite some risqué elements meant to appeal to moviegoers who probably couldn’t care less about Mongolia, sometimes resembles an ethnographic film. Great care is taken conveying the meticulous preparation of golden millet and the traditional process of slaughtering sheep. Non-professional actors are cast as nomads and the communal ambience within the yurt they share is precisely rendered. The local preoccupation with milk as the source of sustenance is treated as a near-mystical component of daily life. Yet, Borchu’s ostensible fealty to documentary realism notwithstanding, it’s also difficult not to feel that she, wittingly or unwittingly, is feeding into a Western audience’s desire to view the rituals of daily life in Mongolia as charmingly “exotic.”