The Beekeeper (1986)
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Nadia Mourouzi, Serge Reggiani
Director: Theodoros Angelopoulos
Country: Greece | France | Italy
Genre: Drama
The late Greek auteur Theo Angelopoulos’ The Beekeeper stars Marcello Mastroianni as Spyros, an aging man estranged from his family and the time in which he lives. In place of home, family, and job, he embarks on a road trip from northern to southern Greece as a beekeeper (as his father and grandfather once did before him). In the course of his trip, he encounters the push-pull relationship of the past and present by revisiting his childhood friends and hometown and meeting a young hitchhiker (Nadia Mourouzi) with whom he becomes obsessed. With Angelopoulos’ precise style of filmmaking, the film is an elegiac journey of uncertain future, a disconnected present, and a bittersweet, nostalgic past.
…the film is an elegiac journey of uncertain future, a disconnected present, and a bittersweet, nostalgic past.
The Beekeeper is the second film in what Angelopoulos had termed his ‘trilogy of silence,’ bracketed by Voyage to Cythera (1984) and Landscape in the Mist (1988). Accordingly, in this film dialogue is kept to a stern minimum to give way to the force of ennui, alienation, desire, and frustration expressed through the bodies of the characters, their individual actions, and gestures towards each other. The film opens, however, with a shot from a second-story window of a long dining table outdoors while rain pours down on it, while off-screen voices of a boy and an older man speak of a story about bees. But the next shot is inside of the house with Spyros alone by the window. Deeper inside the house still is his family in the midst of a rousing wedding reception for his daughter and her groom.
The sequence in the house is one of the most striking in the film: for its celebratory, collective quality, which contrasts greatly with the rest of the film, and its serpentine camerawork around the house and bodies in movement, conveying pockets of isolation and togetherness in different areas of the house in one long take. In the film’s subsequent long take and first long shot, Spyro emerges from the house into the damp outdoors, crosses the street (and closer to the camera) and a wooden plank over a river. Alone, thoughtful, and silent, but already suggesting a history of estrangement from his wife and children. Yet when his daughter and her husband prepare to leave, Spyro lifts her close to him and sings a brief song before they part. In contrast, Spyro and his wife Anna (Jenny Roussea), now alone in an empty house, appear distant and separated. Indeed, they also part, with Spyros’ son accompanying Anna and barely acknowledging him.
The film never provides an explanation as to how Spyros came to be this way, estranged from his family, resigning from his job as a teacher, and a nomad with bees. In this way, the spectator feels a bit of the same sense of estrangement from him as his family. Everyone asks him, ‘What is wrong? What did I do?’ yet he never provides answers. Throughout the film, the neutral palette of browns, greys, and degrees of rust, aggravated by the rain in the opening sequences, echoes Spyros’ neutrality of emotions, or better yet, the non-verbal expression of them. It is precisely Angelopoulos’ effective and profound use of colour, space (in terms of location and off-/on-screen) via long takes and slow pans, and silence that elaborate Spyros’ character, above all his disconnect from all that is around him.
Throughout the film, the neutral palette of browns, greys, and degrees of rust, aggravated by the rain in the opening sequences, echoes Spyros’ neutrality of emotions, or better yet, the non-verbal expression of them.
On the road in his truck filled with bee crates, with the goal of facilitating the bees’ migration for the coming spring, he meets a young woman in search of a ride. Her (she is never named) inclusion in the film lends a different emotional dynamic and hue to the landscape through which Spyros passes on his way back to his hometown. Reduced to a generic ‘she,’ she is less a character than a multilayered filter through which Spyros’ existential limbo can be more effectively articulated. For instance, she can be read as a substitute for the daughter who has just parted from Spyros. At the same time, when he observes her dancing by a jukebox without her knowing, her back turned to him, she is also positioned as an object of desire from his point of view. Promiscuous and bold, with no sense of emotional ties or of the past, still another way of reading her is a representation of the unavoidable present and modernity from which Spyros feels cut off, while holding an implicit attraction to it. This element of unavoidability is mirrored in the fact that they continually encounter each other in random places, which alternate with Spyros’ encounters with his childhood friends, another daughter, and Anna; and the evolution of their relationship in relation to their geographical location.
Initially, he is aloof and taciturn in the face of her flirtations, but gradually appears troubled to the point of evading her. In another setting, the camera begins with Spyros seating himself at a table, and then pans across a plaza-of-sorts to chance upon her walking down the street with a different guy from the last time and getting seated herself, and then panning back to Spyro’s table, now unoccupied. As they move closer to the south, namely, his childhood and his past, paradoxically he begins to actively pursue her. Significantly, their relationship (both psychological and physical) culminates inside a closed-down cinema house, owned by one of his childhood friends.
Like a strange courtship with time, The Beekeeper is densely challenging but also beguiling because it hovers between the literal and figurative, the corporeal and intellectual, with Mastroianni as the fulcrum.
Like a strange courtship with time, The Beekeeper is densely challenging but also beguiling because it hovers between the literal and figurative, the corporeal and intellectual, with Mastroianni as the fulcrum.
