There’s gentleness and delicacy in this heartfelt family drama, a fiction feature debut from Basque film-maker Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren. It shows that the crises experienced by children, and by the adults coming to terms with those crises, are part of a larger ecosystem of emotional difficulty in the extended family.
Ane (Patricia López Arnaiz) is a sculptor living in south-west France. She has money worries and problems in her marriage to Gorka (Martxelo Rubio). They have three children, of whom the most troubled is Cocó (Sofía Otero). Eight-year-old Cocó’s worries and self-questioning emerge when Ane has to take the kids away for a summer break over the border in the Basque Country of Spain, staying with her widowed mother Lourdes (Ane Gaberain), who is now devoted to her beekeeping hobby but whose main occupation was once managing financial accounts for her husband, an artist, like Ane.
Cocó’s given name was in fact originally the boy’s name Aitor, but switched to the indeterminate nickname Cocó – though even this now feels wrong and Cocó asks Ane to use the name “Lucía”. And it turns out that Lucía only really feels calm and happy in the company of her grandmother and her bees, of which there are, significantly, many different sorts. But there are troubles ahead when a family christening looms at which Lucía and the other children are expected to wear special formal clothes and Lucía will want to wear a dress. Heartsinkingly, Lucía even asks if she can die and be born again as a girl.
Ane does not wish to deny Lucía’s gender identity, although it is never exactly phrased in these terms, but she has concerns, and her husband worries that it is too early to be thinking like this in the first place. But Ane has identity issues of her own: her identity as an artist. Over the summer she wants to work on sculpture projects in the workshop that her late father used, and it is clear that this is a subject of some pain to her mother, because Ane’s father became notorious in the locality for taking naked photographic studies of young girls. And her grandmother, calmly content to use Lucía’s female pronouns, tells Ane not to “turn a blind eye” to Lucía’s wishes in the same way that she turned a blind eye to what was happening with her husband.
There is food for thought in that analogy. And the confrontation between Ane and her mother over the value of Ane’s vocation as an artist has, in its way, a sharply human dramatic point that the rest of the movie perhaps does not. But it is a warm and generously performed film.
• 20,000 Species of Bees screened at the Berlin film festival.
