The Depth of a Child's Gaze

Movies | Review of: Spirit of the Beehive

By NICOLAS RAPOLD
January 27, 2006

There are masterpieces that everyone knows and loves, and then there are the cherished gems that seem known only to a lucky few. The 1973 film "Spirit of the Beehive" is one such hidden treasure, and, one hopes, a secret no more. This Spanish classic, the most enchanting and purest poem to childhood in modern cinema, starts a week-long run on Friday at Film Forum.

"Spirit" begins, appropriately enough, with the power of movies. Six-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent) rushes out to see the latest picture show that has come to her tiny Castilian village: "Frankenstein." The confused brute mesmerizes her, and she stares into the screen with the concentration that always looks so serious on a child's face.

The girl's curiosity and use of fantasy to understand her world set the tone for the movie's lyrical flow. Patient director Victor Erice lets the pieces of Ana's story drift together gradually. Her home is pregnant with silent drama - her beekeeper father (Fernando Fernan Gomez) broods while his bewitching younger wife (Teresa Gimpera) pens yearning letters to persons unknown.

Her older sister, Isabel (Isabel Telleria), inflames Ana's imagination with talk of spirits in an abandoned barn. When a scruffy fugitive hides out there later, Ana goes alone to minister to him, awestruck as if before an apparition. It is a touching, earnest replay of the more tragic encounter she saw earlier between Frankenstein and a peasant girl.

Mr. Erice, an admirer of silent film, accomplishes much with a minimum of dialogue, but his images speak volumes. In the family's sprawling Old World country house, the fire-ember glow through honeycomb windowpanes suffuses interiors with the delicate moods of a Vermeer. When the girls run deep into the fields, crossfades weave them into the flat expanses of Don Quixote's lands until they vanish into points. (It is perhaps little surprise that Mr. Erice's other masterpiece, "The Dream of Light," consists of nothing but an artist painting.)

Mr. Erice captures Ana as a child in the grip of a single-minded urge to work out her connection to the world. When her domesticated fugitive finally disappears, her father surprises her at the bunker-like barn. She runs, in an amazing moment of wonder and independence mingled with fear.

"Spirit" is also very much about death, but darker mysteries still run together with life in Ana's experience. Her father points out poisonous mushrooms she mustn't touch,while her sister tricks her by playing dead.The mythic fascination of the inanimate and the animate pervades her sleepy town.

These morbid themes recall the history that lies beneath the film. The provincial setting looks timeless to our eyes (and through a child's), but it is indeed set in a 1940 Spain fresh from civil war.This provides a haunting context to her village's isolation and the family's disillusionment. And for a film released in 1973 during Franco's dictatorship, the image of a monster that kills its masters seems apt.

Yet the film does not require these references for its power. Mr. Erice has made only two feature films since "Spirit of the Beehive"- a downright Malickian pace. But even had Mr. Erice stopped with his debut, he would have already found the true vision of one heart through Ana Torrent's serious gaze.

Until February 2 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8112).