168: The Spirit of the Beehive

Having just completed my entry on Kes (1969; #169) I was struck by the fact that I chose a movie with so much similarity to follow it up.  This is coincidence of course, as I have little more than the 1001 text and the netflix summation to work from as far as preconceptions of the remaining films.  While I could do more research, I prefer to go into them knowing as little as possible at this point.  It makes the surprises so much richer, and indeed I was rewarded in spades with Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).  I write that this film is similar to Kes because they appear to entail similar themes, ostensibly at least.

            Both are films which center on children and the secret worlds they inhabit when away from the watchful eyes of adults.  I wrote that a weakness of Kes was its having lost itself between being a “coming of age” story and several other genres.  Ironically, this same enigmatic trait is one of the strengths of Erice’s picture.  Set in Spain “around 1940” the film tells us, it is the story of a family, but a dreary family drama it is not.  There are issues which boil beneath the surface within these familial relationships, but not all of them are addressed by the movie.  Some simply exist.  The central relationship is that of the two young daughters, one only a year or two older than the other, but eons wiser as far as children are concerned.

            After a screening of Frankenstein (1931) in their small village, the younger asks the elder about the famous sequence which leads to the drowning of the young girl and the eventual demise of the creature.  Neither really understands the implications of the flowers floating in the pond or the message about playing God that the film implies.  Still the older sister, Isabel (Isabel Telleria), tells the younger, Ana (Ana Torrent), that she has seen the spirit of Frankenstein’s monster, and knows where he resides.  One of the elements that so richly adds to the tone of this film is the way in which Erice captures how children react to the movies.  The boys and girls of the village are both captivated and horrified by the picture they’ve seen, and the director displays this, as its story slips into the mythology of their own play.

            Simultaneously, a political fugitive (who may or may not have been the lover of the girls’ mother) takes refuge in the same abandoned farmhouse where Isabel claims she has seen the spirit of the creature.  When Ana sneaks away in the night to search for him she comes upon the man, believing him to be Frankenstein’s monster.  This scene is brilliant, as almost silently it pays homage to the scene in the 1931 film which set the plot in motion. 

            The beehive of the title references those kept by the girls’ father as he cultivates honey, and the clear visual likening to them which is created by the stained glass windows of the family’s home.  While the father is a naturalist, his daughters seem much more concerned with the supernatural, and the title and visual motif thus insinuate the presence of the “spirit” within the home, the family itself.  Not quite a fairy tail or a children’s movie and not quite a family picture, The Spirit of the Beehive might seem out of place in many sections of the average Blockbuster.  Yet it is a film with universal themes that can resonate with both younger and mature audiences, and is a surefire winner in the “classics” aisle.              

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off