The big heat: what sunburn cinema' tells us about the Great British holiday

"As we near the end of a hot, dry August, I'm longing for a Mediterranean getaway; salt-crisp skin, a Fanta lemon, and a tinge of pink across my shoulders. I'm also thinking about what I like to call sunburn cinema homegrown films like recent release Hot Milk (adapted from Deborah Levy's novel), which remind us we're a nation uniquely ill-equipped to deal with the sun. Or, as one popular Letterboxd review puts it: Oh no, the Brits are on trauma vacation again."

"Sunburn is the hallmark of a particular kind of Brit abroad, visual evidence of the lack of decorum that we notoriously display across the resorts and beach towns of Europe. Sunburn cinema, however, pinpoints what makes us inclined to chaos and self-sabotage. Hot Milk, for example, sees mother and daughter Rose (Fiona Shaw) and Sofia (Emma Mackey) seek answers for Rose's undiagnosed pain at a mysterious Spanish clinic, making a sad holiday out of a desperate last ditch effort to improve their lives."

Sunburn cinema centers on British holidaymakers whose attempts at escape devolve into humiliation, chaos and failed self-reinvention. Films in the strain span from tongue-in-cheek Carry On Abroad to gross-out farces such as Kevin and Perry Go Large and The Inbetweeners Movie. Hot Milk follows mother and daughter Rose and Sofia traveling to a mysterious Spanish clinic to seek answers for undiagnosed pain, then succumbing to boozing, broiling and sexual excess. The genre foregrounds hopes curdling in the heat, mixing light xenophobia, injury and bawdy comedy with national tendencies toward lack of decorum and emotional tumult abroad.

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