The Beekeeper (1986)
(O melissokomos)
Country: GR/FR
Technical: col 122m
Director: Theodoros Angelopoulos
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Nadia Mourouzi, Serge Reggiani
Synopsis:
A beekeeper wanders around a wintry Greek landscape tending to his hives, unable to reconcile the company of a rootless hitchhiker with the renewal of a new spring.
Review:
Over two hours of almost dialogue-less scenes in rainy streets and dank hotel rooms between these two downcast individuals. She doesn't know what to do with her life, and he cannot face yet another season of beekeeping drudgery, or the old age that lies ahead. If the meaning of his life isn't his trade, what is it? His wife as much as rejects him and he embarks on a tour of all the places and people of his youth, abandoned or dying as the case may be. The girl leaves him, unable to face his crisis with him, and in despair he incites his bees to kill him. One's appreciation of this powerful film depends upon one's taste for Angelopoulos's style of cinema in general: it is slow, very little happens, but it is the effect of immersion in another's existence, however depressing, that brings with it rewards of a lasting kind.
(O melissokomos)
Country: GR/FR
Technical: col 122m
Director: Theodoros Angelopoulos
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Nadia Mourouzi, Serge Reggiani
Synopsis:
A beekeeper wanders around a wintry Greek landscape tending to his hives, unable to reconcile the company of a rootless hitchhiker with the renewal of a new spring.
Review:
Over two hours of almost dialogue-less scenes in rainy streets and dank hotel rooms between these two downcast individuals. She doesn't know what to do with her life, and he cannot face yet another season of beekeeping drudgery, or the old age that lies ahead. If the meaning of his life isn't his trade, what is it? His wife as much as rejects him and he embarks on a tour of all the places and people of his youth, abandoned or dying as the case may be. The girl leaves him, unable to face his crisis with him, and in despair he incites his bees to kill him. One's appreciation of this powerful film depends upon one's taste for Angelopoulos's style of cinema in general: it is slow, very little happens, but it is the effect of immersion in another's existence, however depressing, that brings with it rewards of a lasting kind.
(O melissokomos)
Country: GR/FR
Technical: col 122m
Director: Theodoros Angelopoulos
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Nadia Mourouzi, Serge Reggiani
Synopsis:
A beekeeper wanders around a wintry Greek landscape tending to his hives, unable to reconcile the company of a rootless hitchhiker with the renewal of a new spring.
Review:
Over two hours of almost dialogue-less scenes in rainy streets and dank hotel rooms between these two downcast individuals. She doesn't know what to do with her life, and he cannot face yet another season of beekeeping drudgery, or the old age that lies ahead. If the meaning of his life isn't his trade, what is it? His wife as much as rejects him and he embarks on a tour of all the places and people of his youth, abandoned or dying as the case may be. The girl leaves him, unable to face his crisis with him, and in despair he incites his bees to kill him. One's appreciation of this powerful film depends upon one's taste for Angelopoulos's style of cinema in general: it is slow, very little happens, but it is the effect of immersion in another's existence, however depressing, that brings with it rewards of a lasting kind.