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iView Author:
SAAD NAWAB , Vadodara, India

EMAIL:
saadnawab [at] gmail.com

Spirit of the beehive - A review ——

Looking into the eyes of a child will make us see more than we can manifest. To them the world is an illusion, an escape from all mandarins. Fantasy and imagination – are separate nuances delved differently for adults and children, the former not able to understand the latter.

Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive is widely regarded as the most important Spanish film of the 1970’s, taking place somewhere around the Castilian plain in Spain, 1940, in the wake of the civil war. A travelling film show comes to a village with a print of James Whales ‘Frankenstein‘.

Two sisters Ana and Isabel watch the film and subsequently Ana wants the reason behind the killing of a girl by the monster and his subsequent death later. Her sister gives the answer stating that it is all fake and she has seen the monster herself in the form of a spirit near the village answering to those that seek him out. From then on a journey begins in a search of the monster. The whimsical plot doesn’t hamper the conveyance of a director’s vision. And due to the verity of the film on various social and political themes hanging in the backdrop waiting to be searched, no cinema-dystrophy occurs.

To get right to the point here, this film is meant to be absorbed patiently. For this particular piece of work to co-exist and relished with today’s cinema is astonishing, yet equivocal. We want our films to be short and full of fortissimous happenings. Spirit of the beehive goes against all this. The magic lies in the silence and in the moments of a child’s discovery.

Ana’s journey is a reconciliation of what she has learnt and what she is learning through fortitudes. To her nothing is what it seems. All this oozes out due to the electrifying performance of Ana (played by Ana Torrent) who gives it all thru her sense of wonder. When she finds a larger, wider footprint than hers, it’ll make anyone believe that her quest is far more real than it seems. For the viewer, her journey may be uneventful/unnoticeable. But examining one’s own childhood willmake you reconsider.

From the stained honey combed shaped glass to parallel rooms, each object in a scene has purpose and meaning. For some people the film may move too slowly for its own good. But the pace and the length (around 90 minutes) of the film are justifiable only to those who have experienced it. There are other subplots revolving around Ana - her father writing on the sociological patterns of the bees, her mother writing to someone gone at war and Ana’s relationship with her sister showing the two different sides of the same coin. These, in the background are vital to Ana’s search for the spirit which eventually leads to rather unfortunate occurrence in the life of the child.

Spirit of the beehive has so many motives, so many intentions, so many messages that this short a review is unworthy. At its heart are the discoveries and imaginations of childhood. With soothingly captured scenes, exalting performances and a sweet dash of magical realism, Spirit of the beehive is a timeless story whose moving images excavate a bond where fantasy and reality were once one.