Some directors come to the medium with a painter’s eye. In 1973, debut director Victor Erice brought the sun and earth tones of a post-civil war Spain to life in “Spirit of the Beehive,” creating a moving painting that is one of the most beautiful and haunting films ever made.
Period pieces aren’t always about Regency era dukes and mournful looks across the moors. Sometimes period pieces are populated by long, lingering shots of two little girls traipsing across a fallow field in rural, war-scarred Spain. It’s 1940 in a small Castilian Village, and six-year old Ana and her sister Isabel, between attending their one-room schoolhouse and having quiet dinners with their aloof parents, watch a traveling movie show of “Frankenstein.” The impressionable Ana is forever changed by the film, and struggles to understand death and danger in a world of grieving, secretive people, newly under the control of the dictator Franco.
“Beehive”’s influence is wide, most evident in other-wordly, coming-of-age movies like “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Tideland,” and “Reflecting Skin.” But where those movies make the magic in magic realism front and center, “Spirit of the Beehive” creates magic out of the mysteries of a child’s mind with straight forward film work. An exemplary film about childhood, Erice brings a deep respect to filming children. The film is set in utter reality, and it is Ana’s face, her eyes filling the screen, and her strange rituals and barely expressed understanding that creates the wonder of this film, letting her tiny body carry the weight of the mysteries she is navigating. It is a masterpiece that the viewer will not soon forget.
It has been fifty years since “Spirit of the Beehive” premiered as an instant classic. Between 1973-1992, Erice only made 2 other feature films, spending a lot of his career on projects that fell through. These features came out roughly 10 years apart, first with “El Sur” (1983), followed up by the documentary about painter Antonio Lopez, “Dream of Light” in 1992. Now in his eighties, Erice is back with “Close Your Eyes,” a film in which he circles back to his first film. Like other filmmakers of his generation, namely Martin Scorsese with “The Irishman,” Francis Ford Coppola with “Megalopolis,” and Pedro Almodovar with “Pain & Glory” he is using this late stage fiction to reflect on his life and career, and to address the mysteries of growing old.
“Close Your Eyes” centers on Miguel, an aging film director whose career was frustrated and ended by the mysterious disappearance of his main actor and closest friend, Julio. Now, twenty years later, an “Unsolved Mysteries” type show is revisiting the mystery of Julio’s disappearance, bringing this pain to the surface for Miguel and Julio’s daughter, both of who were resigned to never knowing what happened.
At nearly three hours, “Close Your Eyes” is too long, with most of the intriguing action not appearing until the the final third of the film. This section of the film contains its own momentum, but first, to get there, the viewer must go on a tour of Miguel’s regrets. While this section could use some tightening up, “Close Your Eyes” is still a masterclass in building mystery by watching faces and is full of an infectious love for Spain. Erice turns his painterly eye towards the mundane objects of our present, to car interiors, and storage units full of film and papers and decades old memento boxes, and saves his otherworldly light for the sea and the buildings that litter its coast.
An obvious stand-in for Erice, the fictional Miguel is also an artist intrigued by father/daughter relationships, and Julio’s daughter is played by Ana Torrent, the child star from “Spirit of the Beehive.” Now a middle-aged woman, she is again a daughter named Ana who is asking for communion from a mysterious spirit/man. It is an aching callback to the earlier film, echoing the language and relationship that the 30 year old Erice explored in 1973. Any student of great film who has an infinity for “Beehive” must watch “Close Your Eyes,” and any person interested in the questions that come with aging will find much to ponder in this film. A movie about the magic of filmmaking and watching, it is a gorgeous closing of a circle, of a lifetime.
If you liked these films, follow them up with:
Night of the Hunter (1955)
Fanny & Alexander (1982)
Reflecting Skin (1990)
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Childhood of a Leader (2015)
Pain & Glory (2019)
