The Denver Post

In the aftermath of war, a survivor finds herself

- By Manohla Dargis

The spare, tightly wound drama “Hive” opens with the movie equivalent of a hand grabbing your throat. An unsmiling woman with a hard, monumental profile stands alone next to a truck. People mill around nearby, murmuring indistinct­ly. Abruptly, the woman ducks under some police tape and into the truck, where she hastily begins unzipping one white body bag after another and just as quickly scanning their contents, her nose wrinkling at the exposed bundles of tattered clothing, remnants of missing persons. She is soon ejected by a worker, but her search continues.

The woman, Fahrije (Yllka Gashi), is looking for her husband, one of the missing, who disappeare­d years ago during the Kosovo War. Now, with her two children and a disabled father-in-law, she struggles to keep the family going. She labors with the beehives that her husband once managed, selling jars of honey at a local market. Sales are modest and sometimes close to nonexisten­t, but the bees are her only means of scraping together a meager living. Every so often, she meets up with a women’s collective whose members face the same hurdles under the unhelpful watch of the town’s men. And she keeps looking for her husband — a haunting, troubling phantom.

A liberation story told with easy naturalism and broad political strokes, “Hive” tracks Fahrije on her path to independen­ce. Like its protagonis­t, the movie is stern, direct and attentive to ordinary life. Writer-director Blerta Basholli doesn’t bludgeon you with the character’s miseries or hold your emotions hostage. Fahrije isn’t lovable; sometimes, she’s scarcely likable, which means she’s more of a human being than an emblem of virtuous suffering. She has her charms, although these tend to emerge in the intimacies she shares with her family and female friends such as Naza (a piquant Kumrije Hoxha).

With her husband presumably dead but with no corpse in the graveyard, Fahrije is stuck in a cruel limbo, an uncertain status shared by others in the collective. Prevailing norms mean that these women aren’t allowed to remarry, and they’re not allowed to do much of anything else, other than care for their families, socialize with other presumptiv­e widows and display subservien­ce to men. Even Fahrije’s more seemingly innocuous efforts to support her family — selling her husband’s old table saw, for one — are treated like scandalous affronts to him, their life and their world.

Basholli isn’t interested in partisan politics nor is she waving any obvious flags. Instead, she concentrat­es on the textures, gestures and practices of everyday life, lingering over how Fahrije tends the hives, tries to fix a leaking faucet, bathes her son, feeds her family and painstakin­gly processes ajvar, a hot pepper sauce that she cooks, bottles and hopes to sell.

 ?? Kino Lorber ?? Yllka Gashi in Blerta Basholli’s “Hive.”
Kino Lorber Yllka Gashi in Blerta Basholli’s “Hive.”

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