surprisingly divisive when it premiered at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival –– included a thematic interpretation of the film’s title. He wrote that Beeswax, a picture which has nothing directly to do with either bees or wax, was titled as such as “a tip to the film’s depiction of life as a hive, where people passive-aggressively fall on each other for support in the face of life’s overwhelming choices, and in doing so both limit and enable choices to be made.” It’s right to shine a light on Beeswax as a film about a community’s interconnectedness — and probable that the nuances of that specific community, Austin, might feel like flat, mundane Americana to an eye hoping for a retread of the classically cool “disaffected rocker in black and white” vibe of Mutual Appreciation. But the title also seems like something of a multi-layered reference to the film’s ambitious leap ahead of Bujalski’s previous filmography. Having built a following based on two finely calibrated odes to linguistic imprecision, Bujalski’s third film moves away from messy, non-committal “mumbling”, in order to cleverly examine the double-speak of slang, simile and idiom that flows through American conversation uninterrogated. As a moniker for this crayon-colorful (and beautifully shot) comedy steeped in colloquial American English, the title Beeswax feels less like a metaphor for anything bees do in public, than a veiled reference to private lives - as in, “mind your own beeswax.”
Bujalski built the script around actual twin sisters Maggie and Tilly Hatcher, who play twin sisters Lauren and Jeannie; both non-actors, the former appeared in the director’s student thesis film at Harvard, and the latter’s real-life use of a wheelchair makes it into the film. Jeannie’s disability is never specified or commented on in Beeswax, but the fact of it informs much of the incidental action and its ultimate themes. The sisters are exceptionally unwilling to let men dictate the course of their sexual relationships, and though highly characterized, the male presence in this film is essentially reduced to boyfriend roles, all given over to Austin-based filmmakers. David and Nathan Zellner, the masterminds of Goliath and the recent batshit insane web series Fiddlesticks, respectively play Lauren’s ex and his weirdly flirtatious brother, who sets Lauren up with an last-minute job offer in Kenya. Alex Karpovsky, whose oddly fascinating improv comedy concert film Trust Us, This is All Made Up is also premiering at SXSW this year, plays Jeannie’s ex-boyfriend Merill, a fledgling lawyer who thrives on solving his former love’s every crisis.
Jeannie is having a falling out with the old friend with whom she owns a vintage shop, and worried that her business partner is feeling litigious, Jeannie contacts Merrill for advice. An evening spent decoding the language of a business contract resolves, as Jeannie puts it semi-ironically, in “hot sex,” and soon Merrill is back in her life, actively angling for a more substantial relationship while trying to make Jeannie’s business problems disappear. It’s some kind of reconcilliation romance, but Beeswax is more complicated than your average comedy of remarriage. It slowly emerges that Jeannie might have called Merrill not just because she was in crisis, but because she knew he’d be attracted to her crisis, and her need is thus, in a way, a gift to him, something to fill up his own lack.
