Sweet Milk Lake

oscar3.5

Harvey Zielenski the actor/writer/director you are. I never knew I needed a queer Australian Parent Trap until now. A film with a lot of humour and heart that feels so beautifully real, with the kind of authentic queer and trans representation Australian media so often lacks. Sweet Milk Lake feels very lived in, and captures well feeling of queer alienation and othering. Whilst some sections can verge into slightly twee or soapy territory and some humour felt a bit forced, this is a stellar first filmic effort from Zielenski. The best part of any MIFF is getting to be in the room with the incredible local creatives who realise these stories, and this is no exception.

bigbadjosie5.0

this film weaves so many tones together at all once in a way that feels very genuinely trans: it delights in the funniness of being trans and the whacky hijinks that can get you into, the beautiful moments of genuine connection with other men/masculinity are coloured with the brightness and intensity only known to someone deprived of that for so long, ALL while the horror of being outed looms constantly in the background. these different feelings never clash but stand in contrast all becoming more intense and wonderful.using mistaken identity parent trap shenanigans as a vehicle for exploring all these facets of being stealth is truly a stroke of genius. jake comes back to his past, and finds an opportunity to rewrite it - a taste of what it could be like to be cis and relishes in it to the extent anyone can while knowing that if the people around them found out, they would see him as an entirely different person. seeing regional victoria portrayed in this way is special for at lot of reasons. First the obvious it's cool to see queer stories not taking place not in cities, the messy and complicated reality of being queer in small towns. Secondly it's just very pretty. But I think most striking for me is the role the setting and natural environment played in the story. The dive into the lake, the view from the hill, the rain glowing in streetlights as it falls onto his bloodied face. Jake is able to exist in these breathtaking environments, and get a glimpse of what true liberation might feel like.i feel so truly blessed to have seen this premiere ! this is the type of movie i couldn't have dreamt of trying to imagine for so much of my life - so to be in a cinema where it is actually realised, and done so so so beautifully felt unreal in all the best ways.

sam :)

This is a tricky one. I understand the need for there to be trans narratives that cater at least in part to cis audiences (get that bag, obvs) - this is not a bad thing, even if it means trans audiences don't get as much out of them. The problem with Sweet Milk Lake is that it goes so far in catering to its cis audience that its entire structure seems to exist to indulge their worst impulses.The disclosure tension is at the base of so many early trans screen narratives. It's the idea that by not disclosing their trans status, the trans subject is deceiving the people around them and is at least in part responsible for what happens when they are exposed. We see it most notably in 80s & 90s films like Boys Don't Cry, The Crying Game, even Ace Ventura- it was such a common trope that the preeminent documentary on trans screen representation is itself titled Disclosure; its pervasiveness defined the trans subject on screen for decades.It's also, obviously, deeply problematic. The idea that passing trans people are an inherent deception is one that even cis audiences have come to understand as not on. Which is why it's hard to see Sweet Milk Lake's central tension - that Jake is deceiving his family and friends by pretending to be his cis twin brother - as anything but an attempt to launder that classic transphobic disclosure tension.It's a conceit that invites the audience to indulge in the drama of non-disclosure under the defence of a technicality - Jake is deceptive for pretending to be his brother, not for passing as cis. Within the text though, this conceit doesn't hold up. Even before arriving at Sweet Milk Lake we see Jake chatting to guys on Grindr, boasting about his 9 inch cock and talking tough. This is placed in sharp contrast with the reality of Jake - a nervous, bumbling guy who can't handle his drugs and who's seemingly only attractive to the trans chasers he meets at the club. At this point his deceptions are presented as harmless humiliations, but deceptions nonetheless.That conceit all but falls away as the film reaches its climax. The overwhelmingly cis audience that I shared a cinema with audibly murmured, winced and gasped in scandal during the film's aborted sex scene - a scene wherein the tension is based entirely on Jake's trans non-disclosure. Even more notable was the film's climax, a scene in which Jake is threatened with explicit violence at his transgender reveal, during which the audience was whipped into a frenzy of scandalised gasps. Now, obviously this reaction is exactly what the film seeks to elicit and it's very successful at what it has set out to achieve. It's a formally sound film - the performances are for the most part great, and the film beautifully captures the landscape in which it's set. The dialogue is mostly well written and even with my complicated feelings about it I shed a tear at the film's emotional climax. But I can't help but feel like it's all a bit cheap - a film so preoccupied with the idea of passing that Sweet Milk Lake itself passes in its cis gaze on the trans subject.