Tell It To The Bees is a 2019 drama set in the 1950s small town of Britain, where a doctor develops a relationship with her young patient’s mother.
As always, it’s important to know where we’ve been to help shape where we are going. Heck, one of the best things about movies is how it can shine a light on the past to show what life used to be like, revealing our great growth as a global species (hopefully). Naturally, the rights and freedoms of the gay and lesbian community is fair game and many films have taken to giving weight to touching and empowering stories from this past. So it is with director Annabel Jankel‘s latest effort, Tell It To The Bees, a small and curious title with a sound start and a greatly compelling hook that somehow slips off the tracks by the time it tries to bring it home.
In the early 1950s, Scotland, we meet a young boy named Charlie (Gregor Selkirk), a schoolboy bullied on the playground as he tries to keep his depressed and financially-strapped mother Lydia (Holliday Grainger) happy. Her husband Robert (Emun Elliott) has run off, leaving her alone and struggling. Soon out of a job at the local factory, she becomes the live-in housekeeper for Jean Markham (Anna Paquin), a doctor new in town taking over her late father’s practice. The women find kinship and warmth in their solitude and isolation from the townsfolk, while Charlie becomes fascinated with Jean’s backyard bee hives, told they are a safe place to tell one’s secrets.
Perhaps the most impressive thing in Jankel’s film is its setting and dedication to bringing this era back to life. It has a genuine lived-in appeal while given a dream-like sheen in its retelling, told in flashback. It’s mostly seen from the young boy’s perspective as he navigates a world he’s not familiar with but understanding key things that seem important. He’s not present for larger moments though, where the women find their bond, but is keenly aware where it takes them, or at least to the effects his young mind can take him.
What works well is the slow build of the relationship as Lydia struggles with her loss, the hope of a family washed away like the rain that follows her husband out of the house with his handbag. This is about the risks these women face, the two exploring their intimacy while a society remains steadfast against such romance. As such, these gentle and deeply human moments ring true and affecting. It’s quite well done.
However, the film doesn’t feel content to make the story only about that, instead putting its titular bees in play beyond the wonder they begin with, staging them as a factor in a key third act moment that feels forced and divided from the the rest of the plot. It’s a noble effort that Jankel perhaps intends to be metaphorical or even colored by the eyes of the boy who triggers it, but is a moment strained of credulity. This is parallel with more about the women that shifts Tell It To The Bees into an entirely different corner, one that will surely make the experience feel more than a little off. The larger message isn’t entirely lost, though it seems some of its effects slipped through cracks.