The 52: Tell it to the Bees

  From June 2023 to June 2024 I'll be watching a lgbtqia+ film each week and coming back here with my thoughts, feelings and plenty of hopes we aren't met with the "kill your gays" trope. I call this The 52.

TW: forced abortion, rape

So I kinda loved this one?

And then I found out that the ending was changed to make it more believable.

Which is when I got real, real mad.

Image credit: Wikipedia

Yeah, so, spoilers, it’s a tragic ending. Because no one could BELIEVE that 1950s lesbians could possibly be happy, live together, experience joy, have a life. You see why I'm enraged?

Tell it to the Bees is gentle and raw all at once, the warmth of friendship and attraction interjected with memories of pain and understanding identity in a town that welcomes no change. It is a story told on a precipice and you know it will fall, the anger and jealousy of Lydia's cheating husband and the whispers of a conservative town catching fire to burn down any glimpse of happiness they had no hand in.

And yet, despite this oncoming fire, there is a slow, daring sweetness between Jean and Lydia's love, their gazes and lingering touches, the family they form almost without realising it and the extraordinary ordinariness of the life they might live. They are characters whose chemistry is a creeping thing, who are pulled to each other in an uncertain and irrepressible way. There is a moment when Jean plunges into an icy river, swimming out to retrieve Lydia's son Charlie's toy boat that might otherwise be lost, and it just made my heart feel so much. Even writing about it I’m almost fluttery, the scene utterly, utterly perfect.

A few of the threads of the story, or at least the way they are told, feel out of place, unnecessarily shocking, like when Lydia's cousin has an abortion forced on her in the hopes she will stop seeing her boyfriend, a man of colour, and Charlie confusedly asks for clarity as her screams wrack through the house, a moment that is scarring and awful and so painful to watch I almost could not- and even weeks later cannot shake the memory of.

However, despite that, I truly would have walked away thinking this was a very well done film, if only I had never known the pointed decision of the filmmakers to give it a tragic ending, to separate Jean and Lydia because their life together would be too hard to believe.

Whoever made that decision? You suck.

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