jonnajureen Review of The Spirit of the Beehive

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

Visually beautiful story seen through the eyes of a child

[10/10 · 3 August 2009]

The Spirit of the Beehive is set in 1940, right after the civil war of Spain. It is a beautifully story seen trough a young girl's eyes. The main character of the movie is Ana, who lives with her father who spends most of his time writing about his beehives and her mother who is writing love letters to a distant lover and Ana's older sister Isabel, all of them living in their own isolated world. One evening, Ana and Isabel goes to the movie theater to see the Frankenstein. While most of the children are terrified by the story, Ana finds it fascinating and is excited by the darker sides of life. At home the same night, Ana asks her sister Isabel why Frankenstein killed the girl. Isabel answers that he didn't really kill her and that everything in the movies is fake. Frankenstein is like a spirit and if she closes her eyes and calls him, he might show up. This has a profound impact on Ana and the story of Frankenstein also come to function as the movies' nave. Isabel takes her to an abandoned building where she says that Frankenstein lives. Day after day, she comes back alone in hope to see him. One day, a soldier escapes from a train and finds the building. Ana finds him and brings him food and warm clothes. Just a couple of days later, the soldier is found and killed. When Ana goes back to the building, she finds only the blood and understands that he has been killed. Here, Ana's world comes into its own and when Ana is wandering the woods at night an inner journey is taking place as well. That night, she doesn't return home. She meets Frankenstein when sitting by a river, just like the scene from the Frankenstein movie in the beginning. Even though the movie is set in the context of Franco's regime, this aspect seems isolated from the story, which is solely a reality told through a child's world, questioning what is right and what is wrong and maybe more important; what is reality. Visually it is beautiful. After returning home the night Ana was found in the woods, she is traumatized and doesn't speak about her experience. In the end, she goes to the window and again whispering to the spirit: "It's me Ana".