You might think, since the film has Spirit in the title, that no good can come from playing around a well, and that most likely there was a psychic lass flung down it a few years ago and next thing anyone knows there's gonna be a cursed video tape doing the rounds and then freaky motherfuckers are gonna start crawling out the damn telly.
Don't be ridiculous, friends. I mean this was 1973, which was, I believe, at least three decades before video cassettes were even invented.
No one was flung down this well, but that's not to suggest there aren't atrocities going on.
The film is concerned with the Spanish Civil War, and the effects of such upon ordinary, everyday folks, like the kinda people The Arrested Developments used to sing about.
About an hour into the proceedings, a soldier shows up, and goes into hiding in the abandoned bungalow. Ana meets him, and gives him an apple and what not, but for reasons neither we, nor Ana, can comprehend, he is killed.
Nowadays, we'd probably get mournful orchestral carry-ons and slow-motion shots of him getting riddled with bullets, and then we see the kid looking on, and maybe a poem or something that he's been writing falls out of his trembling, bloodied fist.
The Beehive Film has no truck with that kinda shit though. We just see a few shots in the dark, and follow Ana as she finds bloodstained rocks and walls where her new friend should be.
It's at least 98% more moving than, say, the bit in Platoon where the fella gets killed for to go on the posters, with the arms out and so on.
War is hell, motherfucker.
There's no reason at all why a man shouldn't admire the hell of The Beehive Film, but there are sundry reasons why one might find it lacking in the "adrenaline" and so on.
For example, anyone allergic to an allegory or two had best avoid these 93 minutes of shots of mushrooms, bees crawling about in prosthetic dwellings, children staring inquisitively towards a village shrouded in darkness.
Similarly, if long takes are something you'd rather see less of in cinema, then The Beehive Film may well send you over the edge into some kind of enraged psychosis. If you found yourself watching Weekend by John Luc Goddard and screaming "Cut! Cut you motherfucker!" every couple a seconds during that opening ten minute take, then you should know that Erice, unlike Goddard, doesn't even want to have a car-crash at the end of it all, like a reward for your patience. All he's gonna do is maybe show you a cat getting mishandled by a youngster.
Article comments
1 - Chris Kent
Rather than a sequel to Spirit of the Beehive, I say a sequel to The Swarm is in order - only one of the greatest bee films in history. What other bee epic can boast Richard Widmark firing a flame thrower from the hip?
People ask, "What were Katherine Ross' three greatest films?" I answer, in all confidence, "The Swarm, The Swarm, The Swarm!"