Spain, 1973
Directed by Víctor Erice
With Ana Torrent (Ana), Isabel Tellería (Isabel), Fernando Fernán Gómez (Fernando), Teresa Gimpera (Teresa), Juan Margallo (the fugitive)
The father, Fernando, is a beekeeper and a landowner, probably the wealthiest person in his poor, isolated village of the Castilian plain. The shelves of books in his studio, whose French windows have yellow-tainted panes set in honeycomb-like patterns, letting in the room a wonderful light, and the huge portrait of Saint Jerome, the author of the Vulgate and the nurse of a lion, hung above his desk, point to a commanding and intellectual figure: twice Fernando is shot late at night trying to pen an essay about the fascinating social life of bees and its possible link to the wider reality of the world – but sleep keeps him each time from wrapping up even a mere paragraph.
So much for the beehive part of the title. But it is not Fernando’s speculation that can explain the use of the word spirit, which is to be understood as a supernatural phenomenon. The source is quite different: it is the impish mind of his eldest daughter, Isabel, urged by her younger sister Ana, who is just 6, to explain the movie they have watched, with the other kids of the village and many adults, screened by the old itinerant projectionist whose arrival opened the “El espíritu de la colmena – The Spirit of the Beehive”. Ana, so Isabel claims, should not believe what movies show, as they are fake. That means Frankenstein is not dead at all, he is a spirit easy to meet, it just takes some concentration. And Isabel would even show Ana the ideal spot to conjure up the spirit: the well of an abandoned sheep shed.
The family would not be complete without a wife and mother. Teresa’s mind is busy with other things than bees, spirits, the wider world, or cinema. She does write like her husband, but she finishes her texts and then sends them through the mailbox of the trains that chug through the plain (to whom she writes is not entirely clear, perhaps a relative). She does not have much hope that she would get an answer – in fact, at the end, she would rather burn a letter than send it. A tranquil person, affectionately taking care of her relatives, she is anxious to get news about her correspondent and worries about the situation. The year is 1940, just a year after the end of the civil war that tore apart and bloodied Spain after the 1936 coup. Teresa’s worries are the stark reminder of the disaster Spain has gone through, and struggles to recover from, under the aegis of a strong, conservative, military-led dictatorship./
Another reminder comes up fast. The film deals extensively, with a keen eye for details and the emotions and fantasies that can spring in a child’s mind, with the carefree and ordinary lives of Isabel and Ana, at home, at school, or near the supposedly magic well. It is a realistic and gentle portrait of rather lucky children in a depressed area, surrounded by loving parents and nice servants and entertaining quietly a lot of fancies, even as the village shows the scars of the war. But the train which passes nearby, which has so far only mattered for the mail, delivers one day something as extraordinary as an astonishing film character. A fugitive jumps from the running train, obviously on the lam and looking to hide away. Tumbling down the slope he gets hurt at his right ankle. Limping, he reaches the sheep shed and stays. Ana, still waiting for Frankenstein, finds him. And decides to help him without telling anyone.
The police eventually catches up with the fugitive, who dies in a gunfight. Since he wears clothes belonging to Fernando, the family gets in the rough with the village’s police chief. Fernando tries to get an explanation from Ana but the girl runs away in the wild. That would be a radical experience for her, and spirits would never look so close and so kind, even when they resemble Boris Karloff.
Set at a deliberate pace, far slower than what the Spanish cinema of the era used to show but not unlike the silent era’s productions, shot in a wonderfully wintry light, the film takes place in the wake of a painful historical event whose consequences are still deeply felt by the adult characters and still reverberate at the time of the shooting – in 1973, Francisco Franco is still at the helm and censorship is still watching carefully. Its depiction of a desolate Spain is bookended in a stunning, intriguing way by the radiant faces of children, with the first and the last images still starkly contrasted: the gaggle of yelling delighted kids huddling against the truck of the itinerant projectionist as he drives to the village’ main square, in the broad daylight (a moving reminder of how cinema then mattered to the population to get relief and joy), gives way at the end, in the middle of the night, to the uncanny shots on Ana where she stands near her house’s main balcony, in her night gown, expectant and confident, ready to welcome the spirit that fascinated her so much and shaped her adventures so incredibly. The wide-open, eager, quizzing stare of the girl is captured eagerly by the camera, as it tries to make sense of her fantasies or the equally unsettling reality and to gather what fiction or facts can tell. While adults are stuck in a groove, or brooding over their fears and their ideas, and while the political terror reigns as relentlessly as an ingrained poverty, children still experience an innocence and have a generosity that their country has bitterly lost.
Unlike the little girl of the 1931 film by James Whale, Ana survives her otherworldly experience. Like the fictional little girl, the beekeeper’s daughter has been willing to welcome, help, and love the dangerous stranger roaming in their land. Like Frankenstein, the fugitive is doomed – and indeed viciously killed, after being chased around, by the unforgiving social order. The last images raise the troubling, if absurd, question: Can Ana really talk, as she believes, to characters who are not part of the reality, that is her Frankenstein and the other man she cared for? What is sure is that her story is boldly blending political tragedy, cinema mythology, and child fantasy, to highlight in most original and moving terms the plight the Franco regime brought while stating that imagination and innocence could still help a new generation to get through the bad times and perhaps to bring about a better tomorrow.