What is deja vu? It is the feeling towards a certain time, event, place or a thing in which one would apprehend to have happened before or to have existed. It's an unlikely matter, but upon watching Bee Season, deja vu was all over the place. We could ask ourselves: Akeelah and the Bee anyone?
Somehow, Bee Season was shot before Akeelah, therefore paving me no right to compare or whatsoever. Yes, the film stands on its own yet miserably hangs loosely by threads.
This family drama was way too familiar for our grasp. Here we encounter a troubled family, a father who drench himself into professional work in a college teaching Religion and Kaballah, a mother slightly detached by her own battles against kleptomania, a son who's questioning his own spiritual belief and a daughter who flees in her own world of instinct and delves into her skill for words and spelling, thus giving us the season for spelling bees. Eliza, the daughter, had just won a spelling bee contest, and when his father noticed the feat, his attention had considerably converged into the newly discovered prodigy. As Eliza climbs into a higher level of the contest, she notices her family's own detachment with each other. The girl had been introduced to Kabbalah by her own father, and when she confessed that she do not learn words in order to spell it but rather see them in her own closed eyes. Her father knew by that time that Eliza has a gift so uncommon that she might be able to "touch the ear of God".
The film, which stars all-conniving power from Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche, was confused in itself. It fails to explain some of its elements, mostly about religious stuff. What was good in this film was that it was able to give a vivid message about spiritual fullfilment and how people seek that kind of nirvana these days.
While sparking some acting power, it's the main lead that actually pulled some performance. Flora Cross, the girl who played Eliza, gave a sheer intensity, and combined with his brother, Aaron, played by Max Minghella, they had easily outshadowed Gere's and Binoche's performances.
But at the end of it all, one could inevitably cheer for Bee. Nope, not for Bee Season, but for Akeelah and the Bee, which was probably a better conceived film about spelling bees and the battles of life.

Rating: B-