The Beekeeper (1987)

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.

Wonderfully poetic movie, the images of which (gas stations, industrial grounds, and lots of rain) stick in one's mind. This film about a middle aged man searching for some meaning in his otherwise empty life is made the more poetic and unforgettable by the magnificently melancholic music of Eleni Karaindrou.

A middle aged teacher retires from his career, dedicates himself to his hobby, and embarks on a journey through Greece with his colony of bees in his lorry. Along the way he picks up a young woman hitch hiker, and a relationship develops between them that explores the depths of personal loneliness and and alienation.Both Spiros and his young passenger have lost their perspective of the future - he is living in nostalgic reminiscence of the past, while the young girl's life is one of instant gratification, she seems to be aware of neither past nor future. Their inherent inner isolation expresses itself in a series of futile, almost savagely physical attempts at forming real contact with each other, that leaves the viewer with a harrowing picture of disturbed, painful existence.This is a slow, carefully composed film, a sequence of memorable images, some visually beautiful, others showing the gritty harshness of life. There is a constant shifting between dreams and realities that leaves what actually happens shrouded in doubt, and a moody atmosphere of nostalgia that pervades the whole film.An exceptional film that should not be missed by patient and observant people interested in the exploration of human feelings.