If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Made at the height of the Franco regime, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE has been read an an allegory of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, concentrating particularly on the destruction wrought amongst those who served in it and their families.Even for those viewers unacquainted with Spanish history, the film is pregnant with meaning. For those interested in the use of intertexts, director Victor Erice's direct quotation from James Whale's seminal FRANKENSTEIN (1931) introduces us to the idea of spirits and human (re) creation that dominates the narrative. Little Ana (Ana Torrent) is duped by her sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería) into believing that there lurks a spirit close by their isolated farmhouse who can be conjured up simply by wishing for its presence. Ana encounters a military deserter and believes that he is the spirit. Her discovery transports her into a dream-world where she re-enacts the famous sequence from Whale's film where the monster meets the young girl. In SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE the monster (José Villasante) does not kill Ana, but leaves her unable (or perhaps) unwilling to separate fantasy from "reality." Through such strategies director Erice forces to question our ontologies; do we really know what being "human" is, and can we separate this state of being from our imagination?This theme acquires a religious dimension through repeated shots of Jesus Christ surrounded by the Apostles and a human skull. In Christianity we are taught to place our trust in the Holy Spirit, but how do we know that this is a "good" spirit, as opposed to the "evil" spirit conjured up in Ana's mind. Erice leaves us with no answer.From thence it is but a short thematic step to reflect on Ana's father Don Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez) and his tendency to write his scientific discoveries about his beehives in a journal, in a manner similar to Colin Clive's Dr. Frankenstein in Whale's film. Does Don Fernando like to consider himself a Creator, performing experiments with bees rather than human beings? Or are they linked in some way? Erice emphasizes the parallels through shots of the patterned windows of Don Fernando's house, which are shaped much the same as the honeycombs in his beehives.The film's narrative unfolds slowly, with plenty of static shots in which characters move in and out of the frame. Light is an important element of the mise-en-scene, with our attention focused deliberately on the two little girls' faces, as well as those of their parents. This visual strategy once again forces us to reflect on what separates human beings from other species, spirits as well as bees.THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is a highly complex work, whose sophisticated visual style and structure warrants repeated viewings. A true classic of European cinema.

First off, I was watching this film because I decided to go through the Sight and Sound poll of best films and check out a few I hadn't seen. "Spirit of the Beehive" didn't really grab me that much in the description, but I thought the slow pacing might bring to mind the kind of art house style created by Michaelangelo Antonioni in his "ennui trilogy" which I am consistently fascinated by even after several repeat viewings.I'll be honest, I was bored throughout the first 45 minutes or so. However, Ana Torrent, the primary child actor, has an amazing face that Erice's camera just adores, so I hung in. Gradually, I came to a more open-hearted way of seeing this film just for what it is, rather than having any expectations of it having to "do" something to draw me in.This film graciously asks you to open up to it, and if you aren't willing to do that; well, perhaps you've seen the kind of reviews here saying how this film is dull and pretentious.There are sublime gifts to be had in the experience of viewing "Beehive," but it does ask you to expand your perceptual awareness in a way I feel helpless in trying to elucidate precisely. All I can say is three-quarters of the way in, I surrendered to it with humility, and it started feeling like a work of art.I'm sure the situation is similar with people who find Antonioni's films dull and pretentious. His critically acclaimed trilogy (two of which made the best of list) can seem excruciatingly boring to some, but in my case, I totally "got" where Antonioni was coming from and felt right at home in an instant, just like many of the positive reviewers here have described with Erice's film.This is why I love viewing foreign films of distinction; they really compel me to imagine a wider, inter-dimensional plane of perception.

Victor Erice, the director of one of Spain's best films of all times, reminds this viewer of his American counterpart, Terence Malik, they do not have a long list of films in their resumes, but both have the capacity to create unusual films of unusual beauty, about unusual themes. It is certainly a loss for the audiences attracted to their work. Having seen this film years ago, the occasion for taking another view came when it was shown on a classic channel recently.At heart, "The Spirit of the Beehive" is about the terrifying effect on an impressionable young girl's of things happening around her in the Spain of 1940, right after the civil war and its devastating effects on the country. Ana and her sister Isabel are the daughters of parents who have stopped loving each other. It becomes clear Teresa, the mother is in love with a man who has disappeared from her life, but she keeps longing for his return. Fernando, the father, lives in his own world, surrounded by the bees he so lovingly keeps in his large estate.Ana and Teresa, like small children they are, love to get into things that normally would not be approved by their parents. Watching James Whale's "Frankenstein" at the makeshift city hall where the pictures are shown, has a profound effect on the girls. Ana and Teresa love straying from home, unsupervised, to the abandoned structure where they believe to be haunted. Ana, the bolder girl gets a big surprise as she surprises an escapee running from the law.Victor Erice shot this film in a Spain still under Franco's control, a daring move because of the reigning atmosphere in his native country. There is a lot of symbolism in the picture, although subtly done. Ana's fears are at the center of the story, but it has also a lot to do with the situation of the country in 1940, a sad period for the survivors of the civil war. The best thing is Ana Torrent whose innocence, expressive eyes, and her luminous presence works wonders to enhance the film. Fernando Fernan Gomez, a giant in the Spanish cinema gives a wonderful performance. Teresa Gimpera is effective as the wife and Isabel Telleria shows she was a natural as the other sister.Victor Erice showed why is one of Spain's most talented directors of all times.

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)Seen just for what it is, a story of a little girl and her precious innocence in a world seeming to teem with quiet adult mysteries, this is a beautiful and somewhat slow movie. Sometimes a movie can be so evocative and transporting, the slowness is a gift, a necessary quality for being absorbed and lost in another world. And an elegiac world, sad and embracing and heavenly all at once.For me, thought, the slow pace began to weigh down the better parts of the movie, and in the simpler parts it become a distraction. In a few sections with somewhat awkward acting (a scene between the main woman, a kind of Nordic looking troubled soul, and a doctor, is glaringly bad), the movie showed its underbelly, which is really a bit full of itself. The metaphors are pushy and overused, the utterly sweet little girl the one unifying and transcendent element.Again, just seen for what it is, set in 1940 Spain (just after its civil war, and during WWII, though Spain largely avoided the war because it was thoroughly fascist by then) it is filled with isolation and desolate landscapes and a kind of loneliness that goes beyond isolation. The key, and important, twist at the beginning, the arrival of a copy of the 1931 American movie "Frankenstein" (dubbed into Spanish), is a penetration of this sadness from outside of Spain, and outside of the rural world of these simple villagers. The little girl is rapt, and her acceptance of the monster in her heart, almost literally believing in him, is a metaphor for wanting more than what life is going to offer, but getting more than other might expect simply by looking for it, reaching out for the gentle monster of your dreams.There are other metaphors, little ones like the out of tune piano, and large ones like the beehives, which inspire some inner monologues that push meaning far too hard. There is a second dim theme to the plot, about this woman having an affair that tears deep into her heart. There is a sense of flow to the movie, of broad horizons (the land is flat and barren), or repetition that builds on itself. It's a thoughtful movie, certainly, and a deliberate one, and a very slow one. It won't transport many viewers (though it has a growing and worshipful following among critics and movie buffs). I don't think the translation and subtitles were a problem. I saw it with a native Spanish speaker who was equally open to the movie's magic and equally dulled by its slow pace and its dwelling on small things far too long, as if taking for granted a patient and spellbound audience.So you might have to see the movie for what most viewers, especially younger ones, no longer understand: it is a metaphor and almost a protest against the continuing if weakening fascist government of Spain in 1973. It had been 35 years since the civil war tipped in favor of the fascists, and the oppressive government had squashed Spain's development as an economy and as an artistic culture all that time. This was a typical faint but legible response, filled with subtle hints of defiance, wrapped in mystery and analogy as a way of getting by the censors.But most of all, this is about human nature, beyond politics. It's about wanting more, about being alone in a family that should be very together. Enter with patience, and willingness to get lost in the mood of it all, because this is the soul of the movie, and it might just win you over.