'Beeswax': Night-and-day twins navigate life and love

The title of "Beeswax," Andrew Bujalski's third feature, evokes the sticky medium of social insects and also the idioms of childhood speech. "It's none of your beeswax," say the queen bees on the playground, and just what is or isn't someone else's business is one of the questions Bujalski and his characters explore.

Another is the boundary between the grown-up world of real business — that hive of money, work and legal obligation — and the ostensibly less frenzied, more loosely organized realm of family and friends.

The focal point of the film's inquiry is the relationship between Jeannie and Lauren, twin sisters who live together in a scruffy postcollegiate section of Austin, Texas.

Jeannie, who uses a wheelchair, runs a vintage-clothing store, and a simmering, unspecified dispute between her and her business partner, Amanda (Anne Dodge), pushes "Beeswax" along its desultory narrative path.

Lauren, first seen casually dumping a boyfriend before the poor fellow is even dressed, bounces from one thing to another, a cheerfully noncommittal, low-key free spirit.

Jeannie and Lauren — played, respectively, by twins Tilly and Maggie Hatcher — present a fascinating study in physical resemblance and temperamental contrast.

"Beeswax," at first glance a modest, ragged slice of contemporary life, turns out to be a remarkably subtle, even elegant movie. Its leisurely scenes and hesitant, circling conversations conceal both an ingenious comic structure and a rich emotional subtext.

Watching Jeannie and Lauren negotiate the complexities of work, siblinghood and romance, you realize that they — and maybe the rest of us, too — exist within a strict regimen of social expectations. Everything's cool, but that turns out to mean that it's not OK to express strong feelings, or to disagree too intensely or to risk unpleasantness. We are all free to do what we want but not necessarily to know what we want.

And these rules impose a reticence that is both frustrating and intriguing to watch. The obvious knock on Bujalski is that his concerns are too small, his palette too narrow. But though there is an attractive dishevelment to his visual and linguistic style, he is at heart both a perfectionist and a serious anatomist of manners and morals — and an artist who knows his business.