Black. But not a comedy. We are so sorry that you died, but we are so glad that we are alive.
I think Graham Greene would have liked that phrase from the movie Milk. “Here people appear at their best,” he wrote of the funeral in his novel “Travels with Auntie,” “serious, collected, and optimistic about their own immortality.” The picture of Brookfield from the first minutes resembles a classic black comedy, and ends ... the same as everything that begins for health.
The story begins with the fact that the milkman Adrian, a bachelor living with his mother, finds her dead, and the circumstances of death are very delicate. But Adrian is not surprised, so he calmly pulls out of the mother’s bed the vibrator that brightened the old woman’s last minutes, and calls the coroner. It is recorded death from a heart attack.
Gradually, relatives gather in the house of the deceased old lady Lucy. An elderly gay brother, two half-sisters of Adrian, their father, Lucy's common-law husband. In addition, there is a neighbor, tenderly loved the deceased, and two girls from the village, who had the hope to hunt the orphaned milkman who inherited the farm. Unable to share such an enviable guy, they decide to live together. Adrian picks up a cute companion with a rare name Ilaria, to whom he favors much more than village brides.
Lots of people at funerals are nice, but there are two problems. First, there's actually no funeral. Adrian wanted to do something about the body, but it's definitely not a burial or cremation or mummification. The family is lost in guesses and nervous, it is hot in the yard! Everyone vying to persuade Adrian to decide quickly, but he does not give up so easily.
In this weather, the pheasant carcass does not decompose for two weeks.
- Your mother is bigger than a pheasant.
- But the meat is tougher.
The second problem: the surviving family members are ready to exhale each other for the most valuable thing of the deceased – a painting by Modigliani. And the neighbor assures that the canvas was promised to her. Poor Adrian begins to oppress the congestion of people: not only that they endlessly make noise, argue, call a taxidermist, but also drink clean his tranquilizers!
In this way, the film is definitely drawn to black comedy. But in fact, he, although black, belongs to the genre of comedy only insofar as he is. It's more of a black drama, because Lucy's family is left to feel sorry. Especially contributes to the sadness of the notorious neighbor Veronica performed by an elderly, but not lost beauty Phyllida Lo. Adrian's mental anguish is clearly not something to laugh at either. And the final will break into a tear especially impressionable.
Those looking for a semblance of “Death at a Funeral” will hardly like the picture, although some will think that they saw it for good reason. Milk is either a bad black comedy or a mediocre black drama, so the impression depends on your expectations.