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.