Hey everybody! It's Shaena and today when Anna and I got together to watch our movie, we also decided that for every movie we watch together, she'll do the review and I'll do an analysis. For the movies we watch separately, there will still be both a review and an analysis, usually in separate posts.
Today we watched The Secret Life Of Bees, starring Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson, and Sophie Okonedo. Anna will tell you the rest of the plot, but I'm here to discuss the real meaning of the film. I suggest you don't read ahead unless you've seen it already!
The film opens with several quick but very well done perspective shots from inside a closet (internal framing seems to be a big part of the composition of many shots in this film). We see a child's hand pick up a gun that was flung toward her as her father beat her mother because she was leaving him. The resonating shot that we don't see, but definitely hear, as an older Lilly Owens awakens makes us understand that the child shot her mother, not knowing what she was doing. This scene, along with the narration, provides the basis of the film; that Lilly does not know who she is, but she knows that she killed her mother when she was four and that thought has haunted her for her whole life.
Enter T-Ray, Lilly's abusive father. Later on in the film we see how the death of Deborah Owens (Lilly's mother) has affected him. Personally the realization of how much he loved her didn't make me feel any warmer toward the bastard--he makes Lilly kneel on grits as a punishment.
To me the best part of the beginning of the film was when Lilly caught a bee to show T-Ray, and we later see her let it out of it's jar and it crawls away slowly and lethargically. I feel that the symbolism behind the bee (and the other thousands of bees in the film) is reflective on Lilly's idea of how wonderful her mother was and how much she loved her. She caught the thought and kept it and nurtured it, but T-Ray told her that her mother ran away from them, and when she came back she was just coming for the rest of her things. Lilly had kept the idea that her mother had come back to get her so they could run away together, but afterwards it got twisted and she didn't believe it anymore, so she let it go; similar to when she let the bee go. When Lilly and Rosaleen arrive at the Boatwright sister's farm, the bees there reconnected her to her mother and that wonderful idea she had of her.
All in all, I wouldn't call this a coming-of-age film, but it has the same idea; Lilly was able to find herself in the things she found at the Boatwright's place; the picture of her and her mother that August had, the notebook Zach gave her (in which she wrote the story), and the black Mary statue in the parlor.
Speaking of the things Miss August says Deborah Owens left when she stayed with the Boatwrights, when August offers Lilly the mirror I think is a scene layered with metaphors and meaning. When Lilly refuses to take the mirror and look into it, I think she's refusing to accept the idea that she's just like her mother and August knows her better than she knows herself.
The book this film was based on was written from Lilly's perspective, and at the end when you hear her final narration, you see that she wrote the entire story in the notebook that Zach gave her. This makes the viewer think of how much she's grown since meeting Zach and how much he influenced her--by literally giving her the power to write about her experience.
I hope you enjoyed this analysis and remember to email us if you have any suggestions or if you disagree-we love to hear from you!
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