The Timeless Echoes of “The Spirit of the Beehive” | Far Flungers

Víctor Erice’s 1973 film “The Spirit of the Beehive,” which is currently being shown in South Korean theaters after his recent comeback “Close Your Eyes,” has delicately sublime qualities to be admired and appreciated. Masterfully balancing itself between the simplicity of childhood fantasy and the ambiguity of allegorical drama, the movie has a series of mesmerizing moments to intrigue or enchant you, which will linger in your mind for a long time after it is over.

The main background of the movie is a small, isolated village located in the middle of the Castilian plateau of Spain during its post-Civil War period. At the beginning of the story, the whole town is getting quite excited by the upcoming screening of the classic American horror film “Frankenstein” (1931) by a mobile cinema, and we soon see many locals watching that film at their little town hall.

One is a 6-year-old girl named Ana (Ana Torrent), who comes along with her older sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería). She is quite baffled when the movie, which is incidentally the censored version, does not show why and how the Monster kills that unfortunate little girl. She immediately asks Isabel, who later “explains” to her younger sister that 1) the monster actually does not kill that little girl (“Everything in the movies is fake”) and 2) he is actually alive somewhere out there as a spirit.

Like any young innocent girl around her age, Ana believes her older sister’s harmless lie without any doubt, and we observe how this little white lie leads to Ana’s own little fantasy. After their school time is over on the very next day, they go to an abandoned barn located in the middle of the plateau outside the village, and Isabel elaborates a bit more on her lie. As a result, Ana comes to believe more in the spiritual presence of the Monster around that abandoned barn.

Meanwhile, we gradually sense a faint sense of uneasiness in their family house while noticing how distant their parents often look to each other. Their middle-aged father is mostly occupied with his beekeeping work unless he’s writing about honeybees inside his library. In the case of their mother, she frequently writes letters to somebody, but the movie does not give much detail on the recipient of these letters, except that they are probably someone to whom she was quite close before the Civil War.

The silence of these adult throughout the film has been interpreted as the indirect reflection of how things were grim and oppressive for many people in Spain after the end of the Civil War, which was the beginning of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, one that lasted more than 30 years. As a matter of fact, the movie was made not long before the end of that gloomy period, but it was actually allowed to be released in Spain because local censors thought the movie would be too “arty” to draw the public attention.     

Yes, it is certainly slow and opaque as your average arthouse movie, but the movie decorates its ambiguous allegory with indelible mood and details to intrigue and then engage us more. Although he was losing his eyesight due to his terminal illness during that time, cinematographer Luis Cuadrado vividly captures the earthy beauty of the Castilian plateau on the screen, and he imbues considerable poetic qualities to many of interior scenes inside the girls’ house. These interior scenes are visually striking, shrouded in warm and bright yellow lighting of a honey-like hue that is clearly connected to those beehives taken care of by the girls’ father.

Some of you may wonder whether the mechanical aspects of the daily life inside beehives, which is mentioned via the father’s writing more than once in the film, is a symbolic metaphor of the Spanish society oppressed under the Franco regime. Again, the movie does not specify anything at all, and it continues to stick to its restrained attitude–even when its young heroine encounters a mysterious figure who fuels her imagination more. The situation subsequently becomes a bit tense when her little fantasy inevitably clashes with the reality of the adult figures around her, and everything in the story culminates to an eerily poignant moment, not long after she inadvertently causes big trouble for others.   

Ana Torrent, who has been steadily active during the half-century since her acting debut here in this film–it is certainly nice to see her again in “Close Your Eyes”–is simply astonishing in one of the best child performances in the movie history. Often direct and expressive in her unadorned acting, she effortlessly conveys her character’s silent emotional journey, and she clicks well with her co-star Isabel Tellería, who also has a few memorable moments of her own. 

On the whole, “The Spirit of the Beehive,” which has been regarded as one of the greatest Spanish films, is superlative even when it is simply viewed as a childhood fantasy tale. It is quite a shame that Erice only made three feature films since “The Spirit of the Beehive,” but “Close Your Eyes” demonstrates that he has not lost any of his talent, and it is really fortunate for me and other South Korean audiences to get a chance to see both of these two masterworks on the big screen.