Saul Naumann (Richard Gere) is a professor at Berkeley, specializing in God. He is married to Miriam (Juliette Binoche), who works in a science lab, although, as with most movie scientists, the sum of her labors is a couple of distracted glances down a microscope.

There are many mysteries in Bee Season but the greatest conundrum has to be: in what parallel universe would Binoche marry Gere? Also, do we believe him as a Kabbalistic scholar? I was happy to salute him as a robotic fornicator in American Gigolo, but, given that his sole means of signalling brain activity is to go very still and shut his eyes, the world of academia may not be his patch. In the role of Saul, he becomes obsessed by his daughter's progress from school bees through to the nationals, in Washington, but instead of testing her on "casuistry" and "arrhythmia", like any other pushy dad, he inducts her into the methodology of Jewish mysticism. He even lends her a copy of his Ph.D. thesis, at which point I didn't know whether to stay with the movie or run out and call social services.

Fans of Bee Season will argue that the religious impulse is no laughing matter, but the film isn't actually interested in religion. It's interested, with a cool trippiness, in what religious fervor looks like--hence the impressionistic waves of saffron that lap the screen when Aaron and his newfound pals are capering to and fro.