I guess if there is a metaphor that sums up Bujalski’s films, it is the constant hum of the hive in which repeated shapes are communally developed based on blind instinct propagating at a geometric scale. Even though bees move in patterns that seem erratic to the naked eye, they are actually very predictable to bee scientists. Beeswax teeters on this behavioral crux.
It is a crux that Bujalski places at exactly the right spot in all of his films, during which we catch his twenty-something subjects in the midst of transitions from relationship to relationship, college to real life, and through the kinds of crises we have time to indulge during that golden hour. PBS used to have a program that showed bee scientists gluing little labels to bees so that we could track the way they communicate with each other in the hive. The one with the blue diamond would dance a little jig that somehow told the one with the red square that there is a pollen mother lode on a flower fifty yards due southeast. It is all a bit baffling, but these insect two-steps made one think about what actually happens when we talk to each other in public or private. This kind of objective voyeurism is what I feel when watching most mumblecore cinema, but Bujalski has a knack for translating his coordinated character sketches into something more substantial than mere exercises in independent filmmaking.
In Beeswax, we watch Lauren and Jeannie (played by real life twin sisters) run a vintage clothing shop co-owned by someone who is about to take her issues with the direction of the store to civil court. After Jeannie enlists her ex-boyfriend’s legal advice and we begin to see the backstory of these sisters’ mutual dependence, Beeswax becomes an intricate pantomime of emotional maneuvering that lets us get behind all the predictable patterns to a subtext abuzz with things like doubt, fear, and apprehension.
The fact that Jeannie is wheelchair-bound is only incidental to a film in which it seems that every main character has needs. They all require some kind of long term care and help. Though they can’t quite talk to each other at intensely personal levels, they can’t conceive of not being part of each other’s daily routines. The conversations between Jeannie and her co-owner are so obtuse because we can’t imagine them actually looking at each other and saying: Why are you doing this? What is the deal here? That kind of admission would break the surface tension that has, at least so far, worked for them.
Just as their relationship becomes bound up in legal and contract language, so do Jeannie, Lauren, and Merrill seem to interact at a coded level. In one scene, a lawyer explains the meaning of the contract to Jeannie, and she responds a bit shocked. She wants to use the fact that she isn’t naturally capable of understanding technical legal language as an excuse for the situation. But she can’t. We are all locked into relationships based on speech and communication regardless of its inherent technical difficulties. Thank God for good sisters.
As this is also Bujalski’s most lush film to date; the Austin of Beeswax is as vibrant and colorful as their vintage shop. A scene towards the middle of the film that has Jeannie taking pictures of Lauren against a rural backdrop proves that descriptors like pastoral are far more sensible for his cinema than the m word.