Bee Season (2005)
Country: US/GER
Technical: FotoKem/scope 104m
Director: Scott McGehee, David Siegel
Cast: Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, Flora Cross, Max Minghella
Synopsis:
A professor with a kabbalistic obsession takes a personal role in coaching his gifted daughter in her competition for the national Spelling Bee. Meanwhile his teenage son drifts away from his father's perceived control freakery, and his wife's kleptomania reaches crisis point.
Review:
The piecing together of words through spelling is analogous to the striving after oneness in the world, e.g. through God or through love. Hence the girl's self-sacrificial act at the film's end, to save the father-son relationship and keep the sundered family whole. This is a bit rich given the Americans' penchant for changing the spellings of words to suit them, but it does not alter the nature of the family drama at the film's heart, where, in a mirror image of the above analogy, the mother's collection of 'found objects' in a rented garage is like a temple 'to hold the light' and re-assemble the fragments of her parents' fatal car accident. The only trouble is, the Gere-centred scenes are at the service of a familiar tale of familial dysfunction, and Binoche's character remains somewhat opaque to the end.
Country: US/GER
Technical: FotoKem/scope 104m
Director: Scott McGehee, David Siegel
Cast: Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, Flora Cross, Max Minghella
Synopsis:
A professor with a kabbalistic obsession takes a personal role in coaching his gifted daughter in her competition for the national Spelling Bee. Meanwhile his teenage son drifts away from his father's perceived control freakery, and his wife's kleptomania reaches crisis point.
Review:
The piecing together of words through spelling is analogous to the striving after oneness in the world, e.g. through God or through love. Hence the girl's self-sacrificial act at the film's end, to save the father-son relationship and keep the sundered family whole. This is a bit rich given the Americans' penchant for changing the spellings of words to suit them, but it does not alter the nature of the family drama at the film's heart, where, in a mirror image of the above analogy, the mother's collection of 'found objects' in a rented garage is like a temple 'to hold the light' and re-assemble the fragments of her parents' fatal car accident. The only trouble is, the Gere-centred scenes are at the service of a familiar tale of familial dysfunction, and Binoche's character remains somewhat opaque to the end.
Country: US/GER
Technical: FotoKem/scope 104m
Director: Scott McGehee, David Siegel
Cast: Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, Flora Cross, Max Minghella
Synopsis:
A professor with a kabbalistic obsession takes a personal role in coaching his gifted daughter in her competition for the national Spelling Bee. Meanwhile his teenage son drifts away from his father's perceived control freakery, and his wife's kleptomania reaches crisis point.
Review:
The piecing together of words through spelling is analogous to the striving after oneness in the world, e.g. through God or through love. Hence the girl's self-sacrificial act at the film's end, to save the father-son relationship and keep the sundered family whole. This is a bit rich given the Americans' penchant for changing the spellings of words to suit them, but it does not alter the nature of the family drama at the film's heart, where, in a mirror image of the above analogy, the mother's collection of 'found objects' in a rented garage is like a temple 'to hold the light' and re-assemble the fragments of her parents' fatal car accident. The only trouble is, the Gere-centred scenes are at the service of a familiar tale of familial dysfunction, and Binoche's character remains somewhat opaque to the end.