Maya Kenig’s The Milky Way, which opened in theaters around Israel on Thursday, is one of the more inventive and enjoyable films I’ve seen in a long time, mixing black comedy, an emotional story of being a new single mother, and dystopian social commentary.
For many people, that description alone will send them heading to the theater, but if you’d like to know more, it’s about a rock ‘n’ roll singer, Tala (Hila Ruach), who has been getting by somehow on very little money in Tel Aviv, until she has a baby. The father isn’t in the picture, and her own mother (Orli Roth Feldheim) is a seamstress who doesn’t have a big house where mother and baby, a girl named Sheleg, can stay.
Tala, who is in debt to a recording studio on top of everything else, hears about a kind of breast-milk factory, the Milky Way, where carefully selected nursing mothers pump breast milk. This is the dystopian part of the movie.
It’s an ultra-modern building on a campus outside the city. Their medical history is taken and carefully monitored. They must pledge not to smoke, take drugs, drink, etc., and they submit to regular tests. There is a cafeteria serving healthy food and a daycare center on the premises.
Each woman is given an immaculate room from which to pump her breast milk, and they call to each other across the partition. Their milk is sold to wealthy families, and there often isn’t enough milk left for their own babies, who have to be bottle-fed.
While the building looks futuristic, the idea hearkens back to the concept of a wet nurse, whom rich people hired in the 19th century if they didn’t want to breastfeed themselves or if a mother died in childbirth, a fairly common occurrence in those days. People stopped using wet nurses when baby formula came along in the 20th century. Now, however, medical research touts the benefits of breast milk, so it makes sense that the very rich would want to buy a kind of gourmet breast milk for their infants.
Tala is rebellious, and chafes under the strict discipline, getting into trouble with her ice-cold manager (Tali Sharon), but she manages to talk her way back into the job.
GETTING A ride with one of the deliverymen, she ends up at the house of the family buying her milk and finds her way inside the luxurious home, in understated, expensive taste.
The woman there, Nili (Hadas Yaron), is very wealthy and too depressed to nurse her own child. Also, she smokes and wants to keep her breasts looking perky for her businessman husband, who travels often. While Nili is a bit unhinged, she and her husband aren’t the mercenary caricatures of cruel rich people you might expect here.
She and Tala bond over their shared ambivalence about motherhood, even though Nili is so privileged and Tala has had to work so hard for everything. Nili, who needs a friend as much as Tala does, invites her to come live at her house and cut out the Milky Way. It’s an offer Tala can’t refuse.
It seems at first as if Tala, who is practically living in the street after a fight with her mother, could get used to this way of life, and it’s idyllic for Sheleg, too. There is a pool and a housekeeper who babysits. But it’s a complicated situation and things don’t go the way Tala planned.
The section where Tala moves into the house, and Tala’s whole rock ‘n’ roll persona, reminded me of Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, when she ends up at the New Jersey mansion of the husband of the Rosanna Arquette character, a crude businessman, and makes herself at home. While it’s a very different story, The Milky Way has some of the energy and laughs of that classic 1980s comedy.
The film draws the large gap between the rich and poor
But there is a darker side, too. The Milky Way is a telling look at the way we live now, when the gap between those struggling to pay the rent and those who are super-wealthy has never been greater. The metaphor of the breast-milk factory is an apt and witty way of showing how some people, especially single mothers, have to make terrible compromises to survive. Many of the other mothers who nurse alongside Tala at the Milky Way are Mizrahi and Arab, and although the film doesn’t get preachy about it, the point is made.
The acting is top-notch as well, with Hila Ruach playing Tala as a cross between a bumbling everywoman and a brash rock chick. Her character made me think of the three heroines in Ayelet Menahemi and Nirit Yaron’s 1992 movie Tel Aviv Stories, an anthology film about three different Tel Aviv women. Ruach and the character she plays would fit right in there.
Hadas Yaron was recently seen in the television series We Were the Lucky Ones and Kugel, and she was the first Israeli actress to win the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, for playing a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) woman in Fill the Void. Here she takes a character we are disposed to dislike and finds the humanity in her, which makes the movie so much more interesting.
The movie is so engagingly written that it won the screenplay awards at the Ophirs and at the Jerusalem Film Festival. Sometimes it seems screenwriters have rewritten their scripts one time too many and they don’t feel fresh, and more often, movies get made using scripts that could use a good rewrite. But Kenig gets it just right here, which is so rare, and The Milky Way tells an ambitious and complex story that is fun to watch.