Let the Breath of God Fill You!

So I've been hoovering up a bunch of the preview screenings in the London Film Festival recently. And I thought I might share my experiences with you.

The LFF has always been a weird one. A major film festival, in a major city that is quite meaningless. It has no awards (not really) nor market so it has no meaning critically (like Sundance, Berlin, San Sebastian or Venice for example) nor financially (Toronto, Cannes). It is unbelievably broad, there are a vast, quite unwieldy amount of films being shown from all around the world in all different styles, so it doesn't even have the boutique cachet that New York, or Edinburgh for example, possess. And because the amount of British films - most of them documentaries or for TV but bumped to the festival due to a drought of product - barely fit on one double-page (there are twice as many French films on show) it doesn't even have any national significance.

However the festival is always well-attended and broadly caters to a population that loves film. Unfocussed, incoherent, low-impact, poor domestic product, hugely focussed on work from abroad and attended by eager audiences - a fitting festival for the home of the British film industry.

But, I digress. One of the good things about the LFF's wide selection is that you can catch alot of things that you simply wouldn't otherwise see. So I always take the opportunity to do so. So far I've seen 8 films. Only one has been good. And it was very good indeed. But that's not what I want to discuss. I want to discuss one of the bad ones. A very bad one. A silly, prissy, preening little film that falls into a category of bad films I hold a great fondness for: puffed-up pieces of self-important drivel that hold a self-esteem so misplaced that they're actually quite insane.

This film is called 'Bee Season' and it is directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel whose 'Suture' I adore and 'The Deep End' I think is very good indeed. McGehee and Siegel specialize in rigorously conceptual post modern, philosophically aware genre pieces - thrillers and melodrama - which are always executed with great and studied technical elan. The thing about making philosophically aware movies is that when you're on-point, that's great. But if you've misjudged - then you turn in a masterpiece of delusion.

'Bee Season' stars Richard Gere as brilliant professor of the Kabbalah who discovers that his 10 year old daughter has inherited from him a mystical understanding of words that enables her to do very well at spelling bees. Gere's wife is the beautiful-but-troubled Juliet Binoche who is undergoing some sort of mid-life crisis in which she breaks into people's seaview-facing, blue-lit Bay Area homes to steal decorative glassware in order to "build the poetry of light". She ends up getting sectioned. Binoche and Gere's son is Max Minghella who is a rebellious teenager who rebels against his father by getting cruised in the park by devoted Hindu Kate Bosworth and joining the Hare Krishnas. For some reason he does not try to fuck Kate Bosworth which, at the age of 18, would be the only reason why you would let Kate Bosworth take you to an ashram. Unless, of course, you yourself are going through an psychic crisis which playing even your father's recommended violin sonatas cannot solve.

There's a scene early on where the silver-haired Gere - looking like a particularly famed eyeware model in his wire frames and artfully rumpled corduroy jacket - spends 5 minutes pontificating on the Kabbalistic concept of Tikkun to a class of haloed adoring students - and I knew right then something was awry. "Yes, I'm the world's most famous Tibetan buddhist", you could hear Gere explaining to his directors from deep within the Zendo of his Winnebego, "but something about how you've written the spirituality of the Kabbala really speaks to me on a very deep level". ["On a very deep level" is a phrase that will have been used liberally by all involved with the making of this film]. By the time Gere has his secret Kabbalist manual out and is screaming at his daughter "Let the breath of god fill you!" while she enters a mystic trance state surround by beautifully rendered CGI Alephs and origami birds you know you're entering the deep end.

And, of all the actors to be telling beautifully photogenic ten year olds with dew eyes and vaginal beesting lips to "let the breath of god fill you", Richard Gere is one the least appropriate.

Gere's performance is simply extraordinary. It's like he's playing a Ralph Lauren model playing Richard Gere playing a champion Kabbalist who's going through an existential crisis. There are moments in the film where he has to play confused and desperate and comes off like he's ready to get nasty. On the edge of breakdown, trying to understand his wife's poetry-inspired kleptomania he looks like he's about mindtrip her for fucking with his flow. Perhaps Gere's performance is another of Siegel and McGehee's post modern games (I was always half-convinced that Kidman and Cruise's performances in Eyes Wide Shut was just one big parting joke on the star system by Stanley Kubrick) - but I'm not sure if even they are that advanced yet.

The film is an endless kalaidoscope of ridiculously beautiful actors playing 'real people with real - Kabbala induced - problems', magnificently graceful shots, disquisitions on philosophy held over omelette in artfully lit kitchens, Richard Gere crying in his SUV and Kate Bosworth looking like hindi Barbie in diaphanous orange robes and a vacant David Koresh smirk.

It is a film based on a critically aclaimed novel that was both "lyrical" and "magical". It is a fil about the mystical properties of letters that starts with a 5 minute sequence of a helicopter flying the letter 'A' over San Fransisco Bay. It is a film that has Juliet Binoche, sunken eyed and powder pale in the corridor of a mental institution, saying "Words, words, words! That's all you say but... {sotto; tearful; beat} They mean nothing!" And it has a photogenic ten year old girl with vaginal beesting lips suffering an Excorcist-like fit in a hotel room because she read too much of her dad's doctorate on the Kabbala and got hepped-up on the Breath of God.

It is a film of many many properties, none of them magical nor mystical. However, whatever else I may think - I cannot say I didn't enjoy it.