Small-town romance has a sting in its tail...
OF A trio of period dramas this week, the pick is Tell It To The Bees, Annabel Jankel’s loose adaptation of a 2009 novel by Fiona Shaw (not the actress of the same name).
In early Fifties, small-town Scotland, Lydia (Holliday Grainger) is struggling to raise her ten-year- old son Charlie (Gregor Selkirk) alone, with no help from her embittered, estranged husband.
Lydia is an outsider, from near Manchester, and still regarded with suspicion by the locals after getting pregnant out of wedlock.
Matters take a distinct lurch for the worse when she is fired from her job at a local mill, and evicted from her home. But by then she has met the new local doctor, Jean (Anna Paquin), whom Charlie has befriended through their shared interest in bees.
Jean invites Lydia to become her housekeeper and to move in with Charlie.
Meanwhile, Jean tells Charlie that her late father, who was also the town doctor, used to say that if you tell bees your secrets, they won’t fly away. Well, there is soon a heck of a secret to tell, as what has so far looked like a feature- length episode of Dr Finlay’s Casebook becomes an overwrought lesbian romance, featuring an abortion, a rape, and various other things that Dr Finlay never found in his casebook.
Jean, it turns out, left town years earlier following a fling with a girl. now, she and Lydia fall in love, which scandalises everyone and damages Lydia’s relationship with Charlie.
It’s all very nicely acted, and while the bee motif gets a bit heavy-handed, and downright daft near the end, the film doesn’t warrant the lacklustre reviews it got when it was unveiled at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. It deserves an audience.
n So DOES Gwen, though it’s more of a challenge, a real slab of Gothic gloom by
director William McGregor, making his feature-film debut.
On TV, he has directed several episodes of Poldark and Gwen is set around the same period, but in Snowdonia, where our oppressed title character ( Eleanor Worthington-Cox) lives on a humble smallholding with her younger sister and moody, epileptic mother (Maxine Peake).
Peake’s last turn as an early 19thcentury misery was in Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, in which she (and everyone else) had far too much to say.
Here, she says hardly anything, as one thing after another goes horribly wrong. It seems the family is being intimidated by a flint-hearted quarry owner, who wants the land.
But is there also something devilish afoot? McGregor uses horror-film tactics to make us think that maybe there are demonic forces converging on the small farm. Gwen is unremittingly grim, but nothing if not atmospheric.