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 THE
BEE-KEEPER
(Greece/
France. 1986. 120 minutes. Colour)
Directed
by : Theo Angelopoulos
Screenplay by : Theo Angelopoulos with
the participation of Dimitris Nollas, Tonino Guerra
Cinematography by : Giorgos Arvanitis
Music by : Eleni Karaindrou
Edited by : Takis Yannopoulos
Sound by : Nikos Achladis
Production design by : Mikes Karapiperis
Executive producer : Nikos Angelopoulos
Production : Greek Film Centre,, ERT-1
TV (Greece), Paradis Films (Paris), Basicinematografica
(Rome), Theo Angelopoulos Productions
With: Marcello Mastroianni (Spyros), Nadia Mourouzi
(the girl), Serge Reggiani (the sick man), Jenny Roussea
(Spyros' wife), Dinos Iliopoulos (Spyros' friend).
SYNOPSIS
In THE BEEKEEPER, alienation and despair have so mestastasized
in the film's central figure that he's virtually one
of the walking dead. Spyros, a man soured by a secret,
incestuous love for his daughter, on the day of her
wedding, gives up his position as a schoolteacher, his
wife, his home and his city to take up again the profession
of his father and grandfather before him traveling across
Greece to the town in which he was born and first learned
to tend the bees, following the traditional beekeeper's
route, looking for flowers that will produce the best
honey, a wanderer obsessed by his job. Like a bee returning
to its hive after searching for food he visits his old
friends and his childhood home looking for threads to
bind him to the present. He drives from town to town
revisiting his old haunts and comrades relighting and
reliving his history in his memory, trying to reconcile
his past ideals with a swiftly changing nation that
makes him feel uncomfortable. At some point he picks
up a promiscuous young hitchhiker who sporadically tags
along with him during his journey and seems to represent
a new generation without memory and unconcerned with
the past, drifting from one place to the next, flitting
between the blinking lights of motor vehicles, gas stations,
diners, cheap hotels and traffic signs along the dark,
wet glistening roadways of present-day Greece. He becomes
obsessed by her. She both irritates and entices him.
What he seeks in her is a contact with the future. But
for her the future is a casual encounter with the next
moment. In the impossibility of their relationship there
is a profound despair of a man without a future. He
senses a rupture, but it's not the traditional one of
the conflict of generations. It's really a rupture of
language. He cannot communicate, even with love, with
the body. From that comes his crisis of despair. Toward
his end, he takes refuge in an abandoned cinema called
the Pantheon. There, mocked by the sterile white screen
above him, he tries - and fails - to bring himself to
life in an attempt to connect sexually with the young
hitchhiker but there can be no connection between these
people from different worlds, either physical or emotional.
For Spyros the past is everything, for her it is nothing.
In Angelopoulos' words, «It's the conflict between memory
and non-memory.» In the long run she only reminds him
of his loneliness and isolation. Unable to come to come
to terms with the present, betrayed by the past, wary
of the future, Spyros falls back into silence and isolation
and returns to his hives, abandoning himself to the
stings of his bees.
«...
the silence of love...»
«Listen:
doesn't it sound like a song?
It's the virgins who want to be queens beating
against the doors of their waxed prisons, trying
to break them down but the guards stand watch and
patch them up again.
Why not let them out?
Only the queen is allowed out, the others they
keep in reserve in case something happens to the
queen. Soon the drones will be going for water.
They're waiting for the queen. She'll come and all
together they'll dance and she'll choose one, only
one, and they'll dance high up in the air, and that's
the queen's dance.»
The
Bee-Keeper
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