Edition: U.S. / Global

'The Price of Milk': Testing His Love, She Jumps Into $1,500 Worth of Milk

Published: February 14, 2001

In the production notes for "The Price of Milk," a terminally whimsical contemporary fairy tale set in New Zealand farming country, its director, Harry Sinclair, calls the film "my dream about New Zealand, this make-believe country that seems almost empty of people, where love stories are played out in silence and loneliness."

Some metaphors apparently travel better than others, because the weight of that observation is scarcely to be found in the slapdash, make- it-up-as-you-go-along story of a sulky, insecure young woman who briefly loses her adoring Prince Charming to her bad-advice-giving best friend. The film's opening scenes find the foolish heroine, Lucinda (Danielle Cormack), frolicking blissfully with her lover, Rob (Karl Urban), in the rolling fields around the dairy farm where they live together in a dinky little cottage with an agoraphobic dog who trots around under a cardboard box.

Despite their happiness, Lucinda worries that Rob doesn't love her enough to marry her. Her fears are fed by her best friend, Drosophilia (Willa O'Neill), who urges Lucinda to test his love by doing things to make him angry. That way he'll realize how much he really cares. In the first of several increasingly crazy tests, Lucinda jumps into a vat of fresh cow's milk, spoiling the $1,500 shipment. After venting his anger, Rob calms down and hops into the vat with her for some milky smooching.

The couple's troubles actually date from the moment Lucinda, speeding in the couple's pickup truck, accidentally mows down an old Maori woman who walks away angry but miraculously unscathed. Shortly after that, the lovers' quilted bedspread is stolen off their backs while they sleep by a band of her nephews.

Discovering the thief to be the same old woman, Lucinda demands its return, but the old woman refuses unless Lucinda exchanges all the cattle on the ranch for it. The reckless deal Lucinda makes without consulting Rob is no $1,500 drop in the milk bucket, as it were, but a $400,000 disaster. And when Rob wakes up to discover his cows have vanished, he gets so mad he loses his voice and is reduced for much of the rest of the film to talking in a squeaky whisper. That's only the beginning of a fable that goes increasingly haywire as it winds its way toward a predictable conclusion.

For all its fairy-tale frills and intimations of the supernatural, "The Price of Milk" is utterly devoid of magic. Ms. Cormack, with her flowing locks, may have the look of a fairy tale princess, but her charmless performance has a sour, leaden undertone that renders her character unsympathetic even in the best of times. Romantically, the movie feels more like a soap opera plot involving dueling divas than a wise moral fable, and the chemistry between Ms. Cormack and Mr. Urban is too tenuous to qualify "The Price of Milk" as a date movie.

If intended as a political allegory about whites and indigenous peoples of New Zealand, the film is simply impenetrable. The guiding philosophy of "The Price of Milk" seems to be that if you throw something on the screen and call it a fairy tale, it has to mean something. But it doesn't.


This film is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has sexual situations.


Written and directed by Harry Sinclair; director of photography, Leon Narbey; edited by Cushla Dillon; music by Anatol Liadov, Nikolai Tcherepnin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Sergei Rachmaninoff, performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra; production designer, Kristy Cameron; produced by Fiona Copland; released by Lot 47 Films. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 87 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: Danielle Cormack (Lucinda), Karl Urban (Rob), Willa O'Neill (Drosophilia), Michael Lawrence (Bernie) and Rangi Motu (Auntie).