The Spirit of the Beehive (1973, Víctor Erice) (Patreon)

68/100

Second viewing, last seen 2002. As before, I was enthralled for over an hour, re-experiencing (though who truly remembers?) the confused apprehension that a small child feels when first confronted with the liminal. It's not death that rattles Ana but the sudden awareness that life and death can share a porous border—hence Frankenstein, most obviously, but also the revelation that characters who die onscreen actually get up and go home as actors, and the possibility of spirits (friendly or otherwise), and the war-ravaged zombies who are her parents. Erice establishes and sustains a heavy, mysterious, foreboding mood, culminating in the extraordinary sequence that sees Ana unable to determine whether Isabel is mischievously playing dead or has genuinely had a fatal accident. (It's quite similar to the final scene of Maren Ade's Everyone Else, now that I think about it, albeit with an entirely different dynamic and import.) As with The Big Lebowski, however—and here we surely have the first-ever mention of that film in conjunction with this one, given the utter lack of resemblance—there's a specific point at which I, uniquely (and inexplicably, to others), think the film permanently loses its way, going from sublime to mediocre. In this case, it's the sudden introduction of a Republican fugitive, who hides out in the abandoned structure where Isabel has told Ana that F's monster now quasi-invisibly resides, and whose function is much more political than psychological. Basically, it condenses Bryan Forbes' Whistle Down the Wind (about kids who find an escaped fugitive hiding in their barn and think that he's Jesus) into a few banal minutes, without illuminating Ana's befuddled psyche in any meaningful way. And everything that follows—Ana running away, the search for her, Mom's implied backstory (burning a letter), the monster's appearance by the lake, Ana's return home and apparent alienation—seems comparatively rushed and emphatic, lacking the ominous delicacy that had previously predominated. Perhaps that's just my allergy to national-trauma allegory kicking in, as Erice waits a surprisingly long time to shift into that mode (at least to a degree perceptible by an American viewer decades after Franco; no doubt there are earlier indications that escaped me). For me, though, just ⅔ of a masterpiece.