Lives on Film: Gus Van Sant’s Milk

Abstract

The biopic is a triumph. One only has to look at the list of films on release, dominated at the start of 2012 by the blockbuster about J. Edgar Hoover, directed by the giant of cinema, Clint Eastwood, and Luc Besson’s The Lady (2011), which tells the story of the family life of Aung San Suu Kyi — winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize — and the struggle for democracy in Burma at a time when she was still a prisoner in her own country. The number of biopics on release does not end there: for example, the adventures of Amelia Earhart — the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an aeroplane — are told in Mira Nair’s’ 2008 film, Amelia; or Infamous (2006) by Douglas McGrath, with the excellent Toby Jones playing Truman Capote, recounts the writer’s investigation into the assassination of all the members of one family in a village in Kansas, a disconcerting story that was the impetus for Capote’s famous novel In Cold Blood (1966).

Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,

O thou, my pleasure, thou, all my desire,

Thou shalt recall the beauty of caresses,

The charm of evenings by the gentle fire,

Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!

[…]

Ah, vows and perfumes, kisses infinite!

Baudelaire, The Balcony (Translated by Frank Pearce Sturm, 1906)