Eight hundred words are not necessary to tell you the truest thing I know about Spanish film critic-turned-director Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1973, ****) (Criterion, $40): this is one of the greatest movies I know. With only three features in 33 years, Erice is hardly prolific, but his work is lyrical, meditative and haunting, with 1983’s The South, 1992’s The Quince Tree Sun, and his 1973 debut, Spirit of the Beehive.
Spirit of the Beehive is a dream, and a dream about movies (not cinema), and about cinema, about glimpses of dreams, a glimpse of Franco-era rural Spain seen through the large, dark eyes of a child. Erice was asked to make a Frankenstein movie but lacked the money to do it right, so in its place, came up with something filled with the necessary poetry of indigence. It’s 1940. In a rural village, a pair of beautiful, forcefully curious, willful sisters, Ana and Isabel (Ana Torrent and Isabel Tellería) are in the audience for a traveling show of a dubbed version of James Whale’s Frankenstein. Little Ana has one question: Why did he have to die? The movie is strange to them, but so is the world of harsh nature around them. They live on a handsome estate. (The family’s rituals have a distant, downfall parallel in the discoveries of the privileged children of Fanny and Alexander.) Their distracted, older father (Fernando Fernán Gómez) keeps bees, falls asleep while writing. Their distant, equally dreamy mother (Teresa Gimpera), writes love letters. Isabel teases Ana that a remote barn, seen from a hilltop across a gorgeous plane of landscape, is where the monster lives, if you believe in him. Ana, a quiet, black-eyed voyeur, races the miles to get there, searching in vain. And one day a fugitive arrives, an injured criminal. She tends to him, his hunger and his need for warmth. And again, death arrives. Where is the monster? What is the monster? Why is he not loved?

Politics are an undercurrent in Erice’s cinema. The consequences of the [Spanish Civil] war are important, he told the Guardian in 2003. The politics are important aspects, but it is interiorized—the narrative has to be allusive, indirect. The information is conveyed by ellipsis. It is the historic decor. But the real heart, the universality of the stories, is the experience of children discovering the world. A father of two sons, Erice knows how to observe children. Can any movie with a child actor be described as anything but documentary? Whether Jacques Doillon’s Ponette or another film privileged with the presences of the remarkable young Torrent, Carlos Saura’s Cria Cuervos, (1976) a filmmaker working with children is capturing a reaction to a world where deeper meanings are beyond the subjects’ ken. (But children are capable of monstrous things, as we are well reminded in Spirit.)
Yet the movie’s mood is mysterious and iconic, its palette honeyed yet hazy, like an unrestored Velasquez daubed with decades of taper smoke. (The cameraman, as told on the DVD, was going blind at the time.) Erice’s masterpiece is thrilling in every moment, grandiloquent with lyricism from concrete details. (And as in the work of Vermeer, the master of intimate interior light, scenes in the home often take place in late afternoon or even dusky light.) Erice has successors like Claire Denis, who find mood and tempo through an otherworldly close attention to the material world, through tangible and often primal details. Erice also excels at framing scenes as tableaux, which seem not like stills or even stories, but like epic, timeless, truths. In movies like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, Terrence Davies has worked a similar, if more autistic vein of letting furnishings and the fall of light carry mood. Terrence Malick is, of course, another great landscape artist. But with Erice, shot by shot, you are caught in an untamable flow of pungent free association, of plainspoken beauty, autumnal yet voluptuous.
Erice layers the planes of his deep compositions with offhand grace: a shot following a bicyclist from right to left catches a steam train in distance, a the third vehicle—the camera dolly—rushes to capture the meeting of the train and the bicycle on a station platform. It’s elemental and so beautiful. Sisters whisper lies by candlelight. The glass of the estate’s windows is inlaid with hive-like cells. With a tiny mirror, a girl watches herself rouge her small, pouting mouth with blood drawn by the family black cat after she’s tried to choke it. And let these words float beyond the movie’s context: Bit by bit, she’ll begin to forget. The important thing is, she’s alive. She lives. Spirit of the Beehive lives, too, and anyone who loves movies ought to be supremely grateful for this comprehensive edition.
Hard Candy, (2006, ***)
Nineteen-year-old Ellen Page is the sophisticated core of the vivid but intellectual thriller Hard Candy (Lionsgate, $28), a claustrophobic battle of wills between Jeff, a 32-year-old fashion photographer (Patrick Wilson) and Haley, a 14-year-old he’s met via the internet and asks back to his minimalist bachelor lair to take a few pictures.
Page offers a study in variations, an exquisitely modulated, mature performance, and Wilson, best-known for his role in “Angels in America,” on stage and in Mike Nichols’ adaptation, is a sturdy foil to her in the unexpected conflicts that emerge in playwright Brian Nelson’s Misery-meets-Sleuth two-hander. (Wilson brings an intriguing opacity to his role in the forthcoming Little Children.) Director David Slade brings a brightly colored, antsy visual style to the confined spaces as the brutal, relentless battle continues. (Slade cites Nic Roeg as his key influence.) Will Little Red Riding Hood wind up with blood on her hands? There’s a commentary with Page and Wilson, and another with Slade and Nelson, which ends with Slade’s amusing jape, “Thank you for watching, buying or stealing or downloading this, whatever, however the hell you got this DVD, thank you for watching it.” An extensive making-of featurette offers more insights into the stylistic choices, and there are some surprises. One of the best interviews with Slade ran in Filmmaker magazine; here’s my interview with screenwriter Brian Nelson.
Lady Vengeance (2005, ***)
Reportedly inspired by the eclectic excess of Kill Bill, Oldboy< (2003) director Chan-wook Park’s Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi) (Tartan, $23), concludes his “vengeance” trilogy with a bracing, formally thrilling cry of “LOOOOOOOK AT MEEEEEEE!” It’s a splintered, fussy, often abrupt narrative about a woman wrongfully imprisoned for the torture and murder of a child, who spends her time behind bars befriending other criminals whose skills can help her exact the perfect revenge on the true villain once she is free. There are several moments that drove me out of the room, including the depiction on video of the moments before a child’s murder, with supplementary dreadful bawling. Park has written, “In popular culture… people mention love, forgiveness and reconciliation… Violence is another important force… That’s why I decided to deal with it.” His visual ferocity is unrelentingly impressive; his storytelling mostly incoherent, which is, of course , why the film’s theatrical promotions were larded with quotes from Ain’t It Cool News’ house torture-phile, Harry Knowles. [Ray Pride]

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