What's the buzz?: "Hive"

Blerta Basholli's Hive won three international prizes at last year's Sundance; either the air or the competition must have been pretty thin up there. It has a compelling enough idea, which is to do a fiction based on fact about those women whose husbands went missing during the Kosovan conflict, and who've since made ends meet and shored up asymmetrical households. But Basholli has picked the wrong (or, at least, a perilously narrow) line of focus in Fahrije (Yllka Gashi), a mother-of-two who spends her days tending her AWOL husband's beehives, and generally appearing too depressed and low-energy to spark a movie into any kind of life. (One immediate problem: she'll likely remind cinephiles of Hatidze, the unforgettably go-getting beekeeper of the 2019 doc Honeyland, filmed not a million miles away.) The narrative thrust is Fahrije's effort to re-empower herself by forming a collective to sell homemade ajvar (a local delicacy, fashioned from peppers and eggplant) to local supermarkets; this in the face of the town's menfolk, who'd rather these women sit on their hands and wait for their husbands to return. Somewhere in the distance hovers the ghost of the Lysistrata: a vision of community divided along gender lines.

But Basholli's vision has no particular weight, because there's never any substantial exploration of why the men of this encampment think and behave like this. Instead, they're presented as stock blackhats from The Patriarchy, trashing the collective's HQ and calling the women whores because that's what bad men do in artfilms that need easy villains for their heroines to overcome. Case in point: the greengrocer who gets turned down for a coffee in the opening ten minutes and then returns to assault Fahrije in the last half-hour. He's never a character, more a tool deployed to make female viewers even more paranoid about the opposite sex than they might already be. The red peppers involved in the production of ajvar lend it passing colour, but it's predominantly drab naturalism, all flat close-ups of glum faces. Some of the supporting turns are wobbly at best, and while Gashi sneaks in flashes of quiet pride around her offspring and the business she builds up, the default setting for this role is terse, unhappy and uncommunicative. You do come away with a sense of a broken land, granted, but all that honey in the corner of the film's eye goes to waste: it's a movie that could sorely do with a little sweetening here and there.

Hive is now showing in selected cinemas, and will be available to rent from April 18.