The Liberating Songs of ‘The Milk of Sorrow’
La Teta Asustada (Claudia Llosa, 2009)
For a film about a young woman's grief, "La Teta Asustada" is luminous and brimming with color. It’s subtle but undoubtedly concerned with overcoming the fear of living and the magic of being alive. The visual contrast between the enclosure of fear and the colors of life is striking and profound.
"La Teta Asustada," directed by Claudia Llosa, follows Fausta, a young woman traumatized by the violent legacy of Peru's decades long civil war. Her mother's rape during the conflict, a trauma that is claimed was passed on to Fausta through her breast milk, is at the heart of Fausta's suffering. This condition, known as "la teta asustada" or "the frightened breast," symbolizes the deep psychological scars left by the war. To protect herself from sexual violence, Fausta has inserted a potato in her vagina, a poignant and painful metaphor for her internalized fear and the extreme measures she takes to safeguard her body and soul.
The film is about moving on from the traumas of civil war. It’s about the choice between burying our traumas which prevent us from living, or exorcising them and finding our way through the world. Fausta's journey is a delicate balance between the haunting memories of her mother's suffering and her own gradual awakening to the possibilities of life and love.
And this balance is portrayed in the most human expression of emotion: the song.
Fausta, in a blunt portrayal by Magaly Solier, sings and sings, in Quechua and sometimes in Spanish, as this is how her ancestors ensured culture passed from generation to generation. The songs symbolize significant moments in life: joy, pain, and sorrow. We see Fausta’s mother on her deathbed singing about how she was raped during the war while pregnant with Fausta. These "sang stories" are a cultural tradition that encapsulates the collective memory and resilience of her people.
After her mother dies, Fausta is left without means to bury her. Her only family left is her uncle, who offers to bury her in their home’s backyard. Agast at the thought of such humiliation of her mother’s dignity, Fausta decides to embalm her mother’s body while she gathers enough money to give her a proper burial in her native land.
Fausta resorts to becoming a housekeeper at the home of a wealthy and famous pianist: Doña Aída. There is a stunningly cinematic scene where Fausta is called to help the lady of the house put up a framed picture on a wall. Fausta is given a drill to hold as she looks at her reflection in another picture’s glass, holding the drill like a weapon. This symbolic image of violence that utterly terrifies her is layered with the picture she is looking at—a uniformed soldier, one we assume she recognizes as having committed atrocities against her people.
It is in this house that Fausta is forced to come to terms with her fears, with the real world and where she starts developing a sense of her place in it. She befriends the gardener, with whom she speaks Quechuan - the language she speaks with her people, her mother - portraying an intimate but complex and somewhat innocent relationship. There’s something sacred about it. This relationship is like an emanation of her relationship with her mother, and it catalyzes Fausta’s integration.
There is a constant struggle of class going on, not just between Fausta and Doña Aída, but also between Fausta and her uncle’s family, who - even after witnessing how hard it is for her to give her mother a dignified burial - carry on with putting on a lavish wedding for their daughter, without even offering to pay for Fausta’s mother’s burial. It goes to show the lack of empathy we sometimes have against even our very own.
Spoilers ahead!
It is during this wedding that her uncle, drunk and overcome with emotion, attempts to jolt Fausta into wanting, shed her fears, to live and move on. But this moment terrifies her—a man in the middle of the night, drunk and upset, covering her mouth and forcing her to do something she doesn’t want or feels like is unable to do… the very thing her mother sang to her about… the very reason she put a potato in her vagina.
Yet another layer of class struggle is seen when Doña Aída offers Fausta to exchange her songs for pearls from a necklace that came undone. Fausta doesn’t know why but assumes this means she’d be able to exchange the pearls for money and finally pay for her mother’s burial. At one point Fausta is called to assist Doña Aída during a concert and it is here where Fausta realizes her boss has used her songs to compose a whole presentation for her own benefit, fame and fortune. She has stolen her songs—her heart, her culture, her everything— an exploitation to be sure. Even then, Fausta is glad when the concert goers rise in applause at the end of the show and expresses such joy while riding home with the Doña and her husband in a car. For this transgression, for the act of acknowledging this transaction, Fausta is kicked out of the car and made to walk alone on the highway without her payment in pearls. Isn’t this what colonizers did to indigenous peoples? Take all that they have in exchange for worthless trinkets?
After the scene where the uncle scares her during the wedding, she breaks into Doña Aída’s home to get the pearls. Well, this is the irreversible climax of the film. After claiming what is hers, her pearls, Fausta is once again confronted with her pain and passes out, then rescued by her new friend, the gardener who selflessly carries her to the hospital, showing that there are some people, some men, that she does not need to be scared of. At the hospital, the potato is finally removed, a symbol that these experiences after her mother’s death have connected her with a different reality—the reality we’ve seen all along, that life is brimming with light and hope and that it is worth living.
Pearls at hand, Fausta is finally able to drive her mother’s body to a place of final rest, in a gorgeous and hopeful bookend moment that really makes this film sing visually as beautifully as it literally sings.
In a lovely, elegant and simple deménouement, Fausta is gifted a planted potato at the end. It is flourishing, symbolizing a new beginning for her, knowing more of the world, but also a healthy reminder of the past, of the horrors she and her people endured, which we must remember at a distance so they do not happen again.
“La Teta Asustada” won de Golden Lion at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, was nominated for in 2010 it was nominated for a Goya Award as Best Foreign Film and for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film. You can buy the DVD on Amazon.