Zgjoi
Blerta Basholli (2021)
Like Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, writer-director Blerta Basholli’s Hive explores maternity, female independence and unresolved national trauma. Unlike Almodóvar’s film, Basholli’s debut feature aims for and achieves sustained synergy between these themes. In 1999 the Kosovan farming village of Krushë e Madhe was the site of an attack by Serbian forces that left 240 local men dead or missing presumed dead. The latter include Agim, the husband of Hive‘s heroine, Fahrije (Yllka Gashi). The action begins in 2006, seven years into her life as, in effect but unofficially, a war widow. Fahrije looks after her and Agim’s two children, her elderly, wheelchair-bound father-in-law, domestic DIY, and her husband’s hive of bees. The honey she sells is now the family’s sole source of income. The disappeared of Krushë e Madhe are thought to lie in mass graves whose location the Serbs still refuse to disclose, though human remains sometimes turn up. In the film’s opening scene Fahrije furtively searches a tented makeshift morgue in the hope and fear of discovering something there to identify her husband. She then climbs onto the back of a stationary truck that contains white body bags. She unzips one, glances at what’s inside, and hurriedly zips it closed again. When a soldier spots Fahrije and shouts that she’s trespassing she walks away. The soldier is far from the last man to tell her in the course of the film that she has no right doing what she’s doing. He is the last such man whom she meekly obeys.
Fahrije belongs to a group of local women, their lives in limbo, who meet regularly for moral support and to discuss opportunities, few and far between, to improve their financial situation. Word of an initiative offering free driving lessons reaches the group; several other women encourage Fahrije to take advantage of it; after some hesitation, she agrees. A quick learner, she soon has her own licence and, through the support group, a secondhand car. As the village’s seemingly lone woman driver, she also instantly acquires a notorious reputation. The honey doesn’t generate income enough to keep her family going so Fahrije tries her hand with another foodstuff – ajvar, a red pepper-based condiment popular in Kosovo and cheap to produce. Accompanied by her older friend Najzmike (Kumrije Hoxha) and a supply of unlabelled jars of ajvar, Fahrije drives to a supermarket in Pristina, with the aim of persuading the manager (Adem Karaga) to stock the product. The manager isn’t among the men that try to warn her off: he tastes and commends the relish, and says all it needs to sell well is a branding label. This success means that Fahrije succeeds, too, in vindicating the village animus against her. A female driver is bad enough, a female entrepreneur beyond the pale.
The opposition faced by Fahrije expresses a-woman’s-place prejudices intensified in a rural community that has become, in light of the massacre of its younger men, a peculiar kind of gerontocracy. The bar owner and the gaggle of middle-aged-to-elderly men who sit in the street outside the bar are the epicentre of violent hostility towards Fahrije. Her relationship with her teenage daughter, Zana (Kaona Sylejmani), is increasingly fractious; the tensions between them culminate in Zana calling her mother ‘a whore – like everyone else says’. The behaviour of the pepper wholesaler, Bahri (Astrit Kabashi), who asks Fahrije out for a coffee (she says no) and, the next time she comes to his premises, tries and fails to force himself on her, startlingly illustrates the perception that, because she’s acting independently, Fahrije is declaring herself to be unattached and is therefore sexually available. A major strength of Hive, though, is that Blerta Basholli reveals the antagonism towards Fahrije to be, at least in some cases, more than just benighted misogyny. To use terms familiar in contexts more banal than the one Basholli depicts, Fahrije is a case of someone failing to ‘move on’ or to ‘find closure’ in relation to her husband’s presumed death. A main reason she can’t move on is that any sign of doing so is interpreted by others as a betrayal of Agim, who could still be alive.
This is dramatised chiefly within Fahrije’s household. Zana’s anger with her mother is fuelled in large part by grief at the absence of a father the girl is old enough to remember well. (Fahrije’s son, Edon (Mal Noah Safqui), is younger and less hard for her to handle.) Agim’s father, Haxhi (Çun Lajçi), to some extent represents the resentful chauvinism of the village’s older men but he’s also in mourning for a loved son. Fahrije receives occasional visits from representatives of a (presumably national) agency for tracing the disappeared. To help find Agim, Ardian (Shkelqim Islami) and Edi (Blin Sylejmani) ask for a DNA sample, which Haxhi refuses to, perhaps daren’t provide. Basholli’s focus on the central family means the audience can’t feel that similar allegiances underpin the outward attitudes of the other villagers but we can assume that’s the case: it’s essential to the story that Fahrije’s family’s situation isn’t unique. At the same time, by majoring on the behaviour (rather than probing the motivation) of the old men who throw stones at Fahrije’s car and, later, vandalise her stock, Basholli gives due weight to the noxious face of patriarchy in the community – a tradition that obviously predates the recent war and its consequences.
Hostility towards Fahrije isn’t exclusive to the local men; it’s felt by women too, even including a few in the support group. Concentrating on the protagonist and those closest to her doesn’t work so well in this aspect. Female envy and suspicion are allayed a bit too suddenly and comprehensively – to allow a sisterhood cottage industry to flourish, as the women join forces producing batches of ajvar. Within Fahrije’s family, though, the distaff side’s complicated feelings are very well conveyed. Zana, once she’s on board, admits it was ‘everyone else’ branding her mother a whore that caused Zana pain and to call Fahrije the same. As for the heroine, despite the new lease of life the business venture gives her, she’s still rooted in what she has lost but can’t let go of. I wasn’t sure, when Haxhi wouldn’t give a DNA sample, why Fahrije didn’t go behind his back and get her children to supply one instead: she may simply feel it would be wrong to ask this of them; she may, at some level, be relieved by her father-in-law’s intransigence, which reduces the chances of Agim being confirmed dead. Haxhi provides the DNA eventually but this seems to be his decision rather than the result of Fahrije’s pressure.
In the climax to Hive, the women gather to celebrate their growing commercial success, drinking and dancing together. (Zana joins in the dancing; Edon, the only male present, sits looking a bit baffled and bored.) It’s dramatically apt and effective that Basholli follows this scene with the reappearance of Ardian and Edi, who bring news. The film ends, or nearly ends, as it began but this time Fahrije inspects grim evidence by invitation. She drives to a building where she’s ushered into a vast room, full of numbered piles of clothing and pairs of shoes (a setting that naturally brings to mind the epilogue to Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020)). Fahrije is directed towards the pile on which traces of her husband’s DNA have been found. Until this point, she has seemed fearfully controlled, expecting to be confronted with what she needs but dreads to find. Now she breaks down, sobbing that the clothing isn’t Agim’s. Ardian and Edi quietly and sympathetically insist that it is but Fahrije won’t have it. Is she in denial of unarguable evidence of her husband’s death or is she somehow right and his fate still unresolved? This ambiguity seems only right: Basholli’s closing legends note that, twenty years on from the conflict, there are 1,600 Kosovans still ‘missing’, including sixty-four from Krushë e Madhe.
In dreams, Fahrije sees herself and Agim (Armend Smajli) deep underwater, struggling and failing to reach each other. Although effective enough, these occasional sequences have the look of dreams of someone who watches more arthouse cinema than Fahrije does. Basholli makes fine use, however, of a less eye-catching water supply – the family’s basic shower (which Fahrije at one point is shown struggling to repair). She washes her father-in-law under the shower and we sense his mute discontent at being so dependent on her. Edon tells his mother not to look when he’s about to emerge from behind the shower curtain: moments later, he’s combing his hair in front of the mirror and Fahrije’s face makes painfully clear that her pre-adolescent son is starting to remind her of his father, who isn’t there to see his children growing up. That may also explain her tears in the shower room after a conversation with Zana about her first period, although Fahrije could be reflecting too on what the future holds for a young woman in this society. As well as the water motif, there are resonant repeated images of broken glass – the window of Fahrije’s car, the smashed jars of ajvar, the photograph frame containing a picture of Agim that Zana flings to the ground in the big argument with her mother. The cinematographer Alex Bloom’s palette is nearly always subdued but it’s remarkable how much tonal variety is achieved within his grey-greens and browns, and there are welcome moments of increasing light. Julien Painot’s simple, unassertive music always helps the narrative.
It’s conventional, at least in Anglophone cinema, for a film to announce at the start that it’s based on a true story – as if daring the viewer to find what follows less than credible. It’s refreshing (especially for someone who’s just seen The Duke!) that Blerta Basholli confirms only at the end of Hive that she has dramatised, as well as an historically real situation, the experiences of a real person. Alongside images of her, we learn that Fahrije Hoti is still running a successful business producing and now exporting ajvar and other comestibles. According to what I’ve read about Hoti subsequently, her husband was indeed one of the sixty-four men from Krushë e Madhe whose bodies have never been found.
In the very last scene of the film, Fahrije is back at the hive that Agim started (and whose bees, she recalls, never stung him). This may not be a winter film in terms of the seasons shown on the screen but the emotional weather is often hivernal (funny coincidence, the first four letters of that adjective). For anyone familiar with Sylvia Plath’s great poem ‘Wintering’, the themes of bee-keeping and male absence, and Fahrije’s determination to create a future, can’t fail to evoke Plath lines (‘The bees are all women … They have got rid of the men, / The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors. / Winter is for women … / Will the hive survive? … / The bees are flying. They taste the spring’). Ylla Gashi, like Blerta Basholli an Albanian Kosovan, is wonderful in the lead role. With her swarthy colouring and features that are handsome rather than pretty, Gashi is dourly beautiful and a compelling presence. At first, her looks recall more glamorous, exquisite faces – Sandra Bullock, even Juliette Binoche. As Hive goes on, you keep thinking there’s someone else she reminds you of and, by the end, you realise who. Ylla Gashi has made such a strong impression that she reminds you of herself.
7 March 2022
