User Reviews

This film taught me that you have to do the craziest things,leave everything behind and travel when you have the change.Then Spyros(Marcelo Mastogianni) after his daughter's wedding he leaves his job as a teacher and goes on a road trip from north to south with the thing that he cared about the most in his life his bees.

Spyros is the tragic hero who finds love but he has to leave it because he couldn't hold it and his lover couldn't respond to his love.In the middle of the film we see the outburst of Spyros he wins the girl and leaves with her.The girl understands his loneliness his silence and the feeling of caring he has for her.The bees are the reason he is traveling but when he meets the girl the travel gets a different cause.So after she has abandoned him he in a final dramatic scene lets the bees to kill him giving him the end he always wanted.

Marcelo Mastogianni's performance is great.Although the dialog is little in the film.Nadia Mourouzi is great too and delivers the story the best way possible.Theo Angelopoulos once again with magnificent storytelling and landscape photography gives the viewer an unforgettable experience.Sometimes you might feel a little bored though,because of the little dialog.But the short dialog isn't a disadvantage because it is the film which needs silence since the film belongs to the Trilogy of Silence.

Also I have a theory on the girl.I believe that the girl is an imagination of his wife and the things the live together are memories of her.He visits his old hometown they make love on the theater,I believe that all these images are memories of how he met his wife.The film itself has a nostalgic air,so by traveling he remembers his old love.Another clue is that people from the present like his old friend(Dinos Iliopoulos) or his daughter have no contact with the girl.With the end of the journey the memory leaves,the girl leaves and he dies.I think it is possible as Theo Angelopoulos uses shots in his films often drift back and forth in time.Of course it is just a theory.

Highlight of the film for me it was Spyro's unique death and the brief view of my hometown Ioannina.

I cannot go for long without returning to Angelopoulos. He is,for me, quite simply, the world's greatest living director. His films generally home in on a single theme and explore it with a profundity without equal in contemporary cinema. In "Landscape in a Mist" it is the quest for the Deity. In "Ulysees Gaze" he studies the man who would put Art before human considerations. In "The Beekeeper" he considers the destructiveness that can arise if the male menopause gets out of control. His characters are constantly standing on an abyss. Either they fall like the director in "Ullyses" or they are redeemed like the children in "Landscape". Spiros (Marcello Mastroianni at his finest) is a recently retired schoolteacher who sublimates an empty future in the temporary respite of a journey with his bees to find a spring climate where they will flourish at the end of a long winter. The opening of "The Beekeeper" is masterly. We learn everything we need to know about Spiros's loneliness and the emptiness of his family relationships by observing the party that follows his daughter's wedding. It is a quiet affair at the family home. Very few words are spoken but glances particularly between Spiros and his wife tell of a lack of communication and infinite sadness. There is a moment of pure magic when the daughter catches sight of a bird in the room which neither we nor any of the other characters see. She tries unsuccessfully to catch it during which time seems to stop still as it does when people in a street in "Landscape" stand motionless looking up at falling snow. It would be misleading to suggest that the rest of "The Beekeeper" sustains the level of inspiration of its first 20 minutes. Compared with "Landscape", "Ulysses" and "Eternity and a Day" the situation is static rather than developmental. A girl hitchhiker foists herself on Spiros. At first he tries to shake her off. She is after all a rather selfish, empty headed tart, who at one point even encourages a young soldier to have sex with her in a seedy hotel room which Spiros is forced to share with her. Eventually Spiros himself seduces her in a clapped out old cinema where they are spending the night. It is an act neither of love or lust but one born of the desperation of a middle-aged man trying to regain something of his lost youthful virility. The result is self-disgust and a terrible suicide of death by stinging. The only assertive creatures in Angelopoulos's despairing world are the bees.

This is the second film I have seen by Theo Angelopoulos and it is slow paced and introverted where much is implied, little is said and the interior lives of the characters are depicted mostly through symbol and metaphor. The plot is straightforward: An elderly man, Spyros, makes his annual spring time trip through Greece in order to cultivate his hives. During the journey he meets a young woman who attaches herself to him and the film charts their fractured journey and relationship.

Spyros comes from a long male line of bee keepers who made similar journeys to the one he undertakes and over the opening credits we hear narrated a story of the hives spoken by an adult male to a male child. The story tells of the virgin bees that are kept captive their entire lives as any one of them could be a queen. It is a sad story because the female bees can never escape their imprisonment much as a person cannot escape their fate. The tale tells also of the drones that perform a ritualised dance in the presence of the queen bee who selects one to fertilise her nest. The tale is beguiling and sad and we learn later that Spyros's wife, Anna, selected him from one of three suitors suggesting she was a queen bee and him a drone.

The film begins on the first day of an unusually cold spring, with snow on the ground, at the wedding of one of Spyros's daughters. The wedding scenes are amongst the most beautiful in the film; long slow pans over people in a blue room with white light. These early scenes could be a series of paintings. After the wedding we learn that Spyros and Anna are separating about which both are sad and it is in this spirit that Spyros begins his annual voyage.

At his first port he picks up a young girl who is hitchhiking. She tells him 'no one is looking for me'. As they journey we glimpse scenes of the two of them together, largely illustrating her antics, Spyros's bee keeping and his occasional visit to friends and places he has frequented on previous journeys. Spyros is intrigued and troubled by his companion who appears oblivious to him and his feelings. A song that she dances to and is repeated later in the soundtrack has the line 'all by myself I'll try to make it, I'll do it my way'. The song is striking and ugly, and discordant with the rest of the soundtrack. The irony is that neither Spyros or the girl is happy alone and neither is forging an individual existence: Spyros is repeating a family pattern and the girl, who never has a name, represents a type of rootless and needy young woman.

Things do not end well for Spyros or his bees. This is foreshadowed in the song of the pepper tree that Spyros sings early on and then hears as a memory when he returns to what was his childhood home. The journey becomes a descent into sorrow with his meetings a series of goodbyes along the way, the most poignant of which is with his other daughter. I agree with others who suggest the film has the flavour of a Greek tragedy made modern.

The film is beautifully shot and Greece looks simultaneously seedy and quaintly exquisite. It is a difficult film because of the feelings it evokes and the demands it makes on the viewer. The acting is particularly good and Marcello Mastroianni is amazing as Spyros. He inhabits his role so completely that it seemed I was watching Mastroianni the man and not the actor. I found myself drawn to his character and enjoy films that show older people and their lives. I don't understand the film entirely or the relationship depicted between Spyros and the girl and I fear such understanding might prove elusive on future viewings. Even so I felt the need to write something about it just as I felt the urge to play the opening scenes again when the film ended. Would I recommend it? Yes, if you are patient and have imagination.

THE BEDEKEPER (L'APICULTEUR) has a straightforward plot involving the odyssey of a former schoolteacher Spyros (Marcello Mastrioanni), who embarks on a journey by lorry all over Greece and its islands to chase the honey. He ends up in his former home, now deserted, and frequents a now-deserted cinema. On the way he picks up a young girl (Nadia Mournuzi) with whom he has an on-off affair before she leaves him to embark on her travels once more.

Set during the early spring, Theo Angelopoulos's film evokes a world coming to life after its winter hibernation - of showers, watery sunshine and pinkish sunsets setting over mountainous rural landscapes. Such images of future promise contrast starkly with Spyros's mental state; his beekeeping business is in decline, his wife Anna (Jenny Roussea) no longer lives with him, while he has become estranged from his daughter. It seems that he embarks on an apparently never-ending road trip because he believes he has to rather than of his own own volition.

Unable to express himself except through physical acts, Spyros remains perpetually alienated from the landscape and the people inhabiting it. He visits several local communities, all of whom enjoy collective experiences of sitting outside, sipping their drinks and gossiping happily; but he can never involve himself in their lives. He remains an outsider, the object of cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis's penetrating gaze.

Despite Mastrioanni's masterly performance notable mostly for its stillness rather than action, L'APICULTEUR proves an unpleasant cinematic experience. Spyros has done something in the past to alienate himself from his family; there is a suggestion that he is a actually a pedophile. On his daughter's wedding day he gathers her up in her arms in such a way as to denote excessive affection; later on he makes love to the girl on the cinema stage by smothering her, in spite of her repeated entreaties to let her go. It's as if he cannot endure the sight of young people as they remind him of his own mortality; hence he needs to deflower them of their innocence.

The cinema-image is also significant, suggesting the desire to exhibit all his seamier qualities in public. Angelopoulous intensifies that sense with a scopophilic obsession with photographing the girl in the nude, the camera lovingly tracking the contours of her body in a series of shots taken from Spyros's point of view. In the end we wonder whether she functions solely as an object of the director's and the leading character's misogyny.

The mood is one of unrelenting intensity that seems particularly redolent of the mid-Eighties, a time when anti-feminism was much more of an issue in Europe than it might be today. L'APICULTEUR 's certainly an art-house film, but one whose shortcomings need to be pointed out.

Theo Angelopoulos's The Beekeeper feels rather strenuous at times, but it's a quality rooted in bottomlessly searching despair, for its central character and the world he represents, and for the fate of the mode of cinema in which such an individual could be the protagonist. Marcello Mastroianni (inherently deep in art cinema resonance, but cast here in sternly withholding mode) plays Spyros, newly-retired from his small-town schoolteacher position, attending his youngest daughter's wedding and then leaving behind his family (which in any event seems to be barely held together) to focus on his beekeeping, depicted here as a nomadic vocation, driving from one location to another, setting up and tending the hives for a while and then packing it all up and moving on; along the way he gives a ride to a young, unnamed woman, and their paths keep crossing thereafter, her attitude toward him ranging from affectionate to contemptuous, sometimes almost simultaneously. The film's effective climax could hardly be more symbolic: Spyros and the woman spend the night in a disused cinema likely slated for demolition, where she undresses before him as if in sexual offering, but the resulting contact is bizarre and suffused in alienation, apparently marking the end of the dance between them; from there it's a short journey to an final scene in which Spyros reaches his tragic existential destination, powerfully conceived and haunting, but less for an individual man's fate than for that of a generation, its collective memories, its relationship to homeland and tradition. Much of the film might have been set decades ago; the film's newest-looking locations are also among its most desolately alienating (in this context, a passing reference to Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms seems weirdly out of place), defined by almost empty, characterless roadside diners and the like, and by numerous shots of people moving in expressionless, almost zombie-like manner.

Theo Angelopoulos is probably along with Tarkovsky and Antonioni the most overrated director of modern cinema and this one is one of his worst movies.

During his long and rather successful career he used to do the same thing again and again. He was lucky, because the cultural environment in Greece after the fall of the junta was rather art house friendly and he became quite easily the archbishop of "serious" cinema in that little and backward land of the Balkans.

His movies are copycats, or rather pastiches of works by other directors. A bit of Antonioni, a touch of Bergman, a lot of Tarkovsky blended with traditional greek movies and sights of the greek countryside. Let's see a bit closer this movie.

The script is minimal, or rather trivial. Spyros, a retired teacher marries his beloved daughter and then sets off on a journey with his bees (!!!) following the track of the flowers. During his journey he encounters other beekeepers, who protest for the slow death of their craft. Spyros is desperate and has lost his will for life. But suddenly appears a young girl, who follows him. She is a beauty and he falls in love, but in the end he lets her go anf commits suicide by letting his bees attack to him.

Only by reading this synopsis someone can understand that the movie has similarities with some movies directed by Antonioni and Tarkovsky. Of course it is not unusual for an artist to pay tribute to other creators. The problem here lies to the point that Angelopoulos just pays tribute. He doesn't have anything to express. This is a bad movie and a waste of time.