Tell It to the Bees

AJ Jankel's film adaptation of Fiona Shaw's novel "Tell It to the Bees" possesses a blend of innocence, mystery, and brutality that lends itself to complex stories about childhood, and children who get caught up in the cross-currents of adult lives.

The child at the center of the film is Charlie (Selkirk Gregor), who lives in a small Scottish town with his mother, Lydia (Holliday Grainger). The year is 1952. Charlie is a typical boy for such times, alive to the same things that keep boys his age busy - schoolyard fights, marbles, time spent wandering in the forest. But he's also alert to the subtleties of the natural world, none more so than the goings-on in the hives kept by a local physician, Dr. Jean Markham (Anna Paquin).

Charlie first meets Jean after getting banged up in a scuffle with other boys who are making fun of his mother. His cousin Annie (Lauren Lyle) - an irrepressibly cheerful young woman with a zest for life and a relationship with a young fellow her family doesn't deem suitable - takes him to Jean for a quick check-up, as Charlie doesn't want Lydia knowing he was fighting. This might have to do with his desire to defend her honor and protect her feelings; the townsfolk look down on Lydia because she's essentially a single mother. Her husband Robert (Emun Elliott) is still alive, and he hasn't divorced her, but he has abandoned Lydia and Charlie, stepping out with someone new while leaving them on their own.

There's little help or compassion to be found even from Robert's sister Pam (Kate Dickie), a sour and hard-bitten woman who also happens to be Lydia's boss at the local lace factory. Lydia's hours keep getting cut back; she can't earn enough for the rent; eviction looms. All Pam has for her are curt, dismissive words.

But Jean, having struck up a friendship with the smart and curious Charlie, takes an interest in Lydia, too, and in her plight. With nowhere else to go, Lydia accepts a job, and a place to live, at Jean's house, a slightly under-equipped but comfortably large home she inherited from her father. It's the house and the medical practice she's taken over from her father as much as the town itself that has drawn Jean back after years away; as we learn the reason for her long absence, we see what Charlie - who increasingly feels left out and lied to - does not: That his mother keeps things from him for his, as well as her own, protection.

Jean's long-buried secret - that she's a lesbian - isn't really a secret, and it's certainly nothing that the townsfolk have forgotten. Lydia - an outsider, which is another reason the locals think so little of her - isn't privy to this information until she figures it out, but once she does she discovers that she's intrigued and excited. The two women drift into an intimate relationship of the sort that literary and cinematic fiction often presents as a healthier option than life with (or, at least, within the orbit of) callous and sometimes violent men.

Everyone's keeping secrets, of course, and Charlie takes the old adage to heart when he tells his to the bees. The film's lesbian romance and historical drama take a back seat, eventually, to an episode of magical realism that doesn't quite square with the movie's other ingredients; then again, shocking episodes of forced abortion and attempted rape feel equally out of place, and equally engineered, rather than organic to the storytelling process.

The 1950s production design (by Andy Harris) and damply nostalgic cinematography (by Bartosz Nalazek, who captures some exquisite bee footage) make the film worth seeing and help gloss over its shortfalls, but the magic you sense the film wants (and that you want for it) never materializes. The bees - living as they do in mostly-female enclaves that function with industrious harmony - will have to get by on their own.