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Bee Season (2005)

Director: Scott McGehee, David Siegel

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From Time Out London

In many regards less audacious in form and content than McGehee and Siegel’s spectacularly fine debut ‘Suture’, this also comes across for its first half-hour as more conventional than ‘The Deep End’ (their remake of ‘The Reckless Moment’), and not so unlike a fictionalised reworking of the documentary ‘Spellbound’. The early scenes are suggestive of happy family fare, with much smiling as eight-year-old Eliza Naumann (Flora Cross) climbs up swiftly from her school spelling bee. Happily, by the time the state competition looms, the Naumanns have taken a turn for the worse.

Ambitious father Saul (Richard Gere) is a teacher who dreams of raising a Jewish mystic and instructs her in the Kabbalah; her scientist mother Miriam (Juliette Binoche) is haunted by secrets; and elder brother Aaron (Max Minghella) notices a drop in parental attention. All start drifting apart, fuelled by Flora’s unstoppable success and by their own needs and desires…

It’s this interest in the characters’ need for belief systems that supplies the film’s thematic core and, finally, its emotional punch. Despite muted echoes of both ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Three Colours Blue’, the character of Miriam feels underwritten, and it’s left to Binoche’s fine performance to make proper sense of the role; the other actors are also good. It’s an ambitious, imaginative, perceptive film which never quite succeeds in tying its many intriguing threads into a fully satisfying whole. That said, it’s substantially better than most recent US fare.

Author: GA

Time Out London Issue 1849: January 25-February 1 2006

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