Lost in translation | 8 November 2012

Mother’s Milk is an adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s novel of the same name and is about an English family who are about to lose their beloved holiday house in Provence. (Diddums, I’m minded to say, but only because I’ve never had a holiday house in Provence to lose, and am quite bitter about that.) Although I am generally a fan of this sort of in-action film — a family go away, there are tensions, they return home again — this is just too hopelessly faithful to the text. Huge chunks of it are spouted all over the shop.

It’s a tricky business, adapting literary fiction for the screen — it’s said the worst books make the best films and the best books make the worst — but this is rather like having someone read the book at you while you’re watching, which is tiresome, and doesn’t add up to anything credible cinematically. The first thing I would say to my film students, if I had any, is: ‘Don’t tell me, show me.’ I honestly don’t know why I’m not a professor of film somewhere, as I have so much to give, and would even offer specialist tuition on what I call ‘The Mournful Cello Film’, of which this is one.

So, as directed by Gerald Fox, it opens with a mournful cello, which is sometimes all you need to know about a film, but I will continue, as I am in the mood. The family in question? The family is Patrick (Jack Davenport), a forty-something lawyer who doesn’t seem to do much work, his wife, Mary (Annabel Mullion), and their two children, the older Robert (Thomas Underhill) and new-born Thomas (A Baby). The family head to Provence for the summer, where Patrick must deal with his dying mother (Margaret Tyzack, in her last role) — she’s had a severe stroke, and cannot communicate verbally — while trying to hang on to her estate, which she wishes to leave to a new-age charity headed by Seamus, an Irish guru-charlatan.