76 of 77 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A silent scream against tyranny., April 22, 2002
'Spirit Of The Beehive', which begins 'Once upon a time...', uses children's drawings in its opening credits, anticipating the film's key scenes, spaces and motifs. This alerts us to the child's-eye view the film will largely take, focusing on two young sisters in s small Spanish village, Segovia, in 1940. They live in a vast, decaying mansion with their parents (a solitary, obsessive beekeeper, and a mother dreaming of her exiled lover), and servants. When James Whale's 'Frankenstein' is shown in the village hall, the younger sister, Ana, is particularly haunted by the scene in which the monster plays with a little girl by the side of a lake, throwing floating daisies onto the water. Her sister tells her that the monster didn't die in the film, but that his spirit lurks around an nearby abandoned outhouse, beside a well in an arid plain. Spotting a large footstep in the area, Ana prepares herself to meet the spirit.
Victor Erice's film, often conidered the greatest ever made in Spain, is at once ascetic and sensual. It is ascetic in its evocation of a depleted Spain, one year after the bloody trauma of the Civil War, a place heavy with silences and suppressed emotions, parched, peeling buildings surrounded by dusty streets and outlying areas as dully stagnant as this new way of life, former granduer a dessicated memory. The film is sensual in the way this world is seen, coloured and re-imagined by the two young heroines, especially intense, dark, bow-legged Ana. The house they live in, like the beehive their father tends (grilled like a honeycomb, glowing with an amber light), is a silent, claustrophobic, ill-lit mansion, stripped of its personal decor, the kind of haunted house pregnant with silent screasm we find in late Bergman (e.g. 'Cries and Whispers'). But while their exhausted, experience-reeling parents give up, the girls explore its mysteries like the innocent heroines of Gothic fiction or fairy tales. There is very little dialogue in the film, limited to the remnants of civilisation (school) or the elegiac confessions of letters and diaries - much of 'Spirit' is choreographed around brooding, pregnant, enigmatic rituals.
In a film haunted by ghosts and the charred traces of a vanished way of life, even the characters, in their movements and silences, move around familiar spaces like phantoms. The two great unspoken voids of the film - the Civil War and Franco - are only indirectly alluded to, and yet they shape this world, they are the spirit of this beehive. A necessarily symbolic and allusive work (made under the Fascists, its strategies, allegories and even style recall Eastern European films made under similar totalitarian regimes), metaphors work in complex, shifting patterns, in once sense, connecting characters in unexpected ways (trains, watches, monsters etc.), they are a further grid constricting these dead characters. On another, they magic another reality, of spirits, ghosts, memories, shadows beyond the reach of a spirit-destroying regime that would burn all records of alternative possibilities and realities. Even if it achieved nothing else - and 'Spirit' is one of the most potent, quietly stunning and moving films in all cinema - then Erice's movie would be precious for rescuing 'Frankenstein' from camp, and restoring its austere beauty.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Somewhere in Castille about 1943......., January 25, 2003
The opening scenes present each character in their private world. Laura, the mother, is writing a letter to a lover who may or not be merely imagined. This is her fiction.
Fernando attends his bees and in the privacy of his library meditates on the nature of existence using the beehive and the industrious workings of the bees within as a metaphor for civilization. The slightest change upsets the bees work...and being 1943 great changes have altered the fabric of life in Spain. We glimpse Fernando's state of mind by reading his accounts of the bees daily activity and for him lifes once rich rituals it is clear have now been reduced to pointlessness and sadness.
For Laura these changes Spain has gone through have forever altered the way she sees life. She feels life can no longer be embraced and lived to the fullest as it once could.
The structure of society which would have given the parents some sense of purpose and significance has collapsed. And the way they sleepwalk through their lives leaves the children feeling like orphans. The only example they have of what life is is learned at school and in the movie theatre. The girls are particularly moved by a showing of the classic Frankenstein. For them this large melancholy figure seems strangely familiar. What they cannot fathom is why the friendly beast kills the little girl in the movie. The youngest girls mind will not be put to rest until she finds her answer.
The movie's haunting scenes which veer between carefree innocence and haunting confrontation with stark reality are perfectly complimented by the Luis de Pablo soundtrack. One of the strangest most disturbing melodies is played by Laura herself. And throughout the film director Victor Erice's camera will on occasion come to rest on one of the mansion's paintings which depict man as a hopelessly lost creature among forces that are beyond his comprehension. The childrens imaginations are haunted by a world beyond their comprehension and so are the adult imaginations and so is the viewers. Victor Erice presents each life as a separate narrative and the narrative lines do not overlap. The films stark strategy emphasizes the lack of cohesion in Spanish life. Each character is lost within themselves. Poetic and stark and yet beautiful as the best Spanish poetry.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
CINEMATIC POETRY WITH THE WRONG ASPECT RATIO, October 8, 2006
I am Spanish and I do beleive this is one of the geatest films in the history of Spanish cinema. I won't repeat the reasons given by reviewers here and elsewhere. So I'll come to the point. I eagerly awaited the Criterion edition to give away my old DVD copy released in Spain by Manga films. After all Criterion has gained an oustanding reputation for the great care they take in their editions. Well, their transfer looks certainly better than the one in the Spanish release, everything bathed in a warm honey colour. A bit grainy at times, the grain may be present in the negative. But the aspect ratio looked wrong to me and when I compared it with my Spanish edition I realized the picture has been zoomed to fill as much as possible the widesreen, with unnecesary loss of picture information at the top and the bottom. I wonder why even Criterion is so afraid of having black bars at the left and right of the screen. It may seem a small point, but in a film like this one the whole frame should be respected. I can't imagine Erice approving this compromise. But even if he did, it was wrong. The framing looks much better in my old copy. Now I cannot give it away. And in my rating I must drop a star just for that. Shame.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
