Film
The Beekeeper
Ο Μελισσοκόμος
On the day of his daughter's wedding, a schoolteacher called Spyros closes up his house, loads his beehives onto a truck and sets off south along the route his father used to take. On the road he picks up a hitchhiking girl.
About
The second film of the Trilogy of Silence, and the first time Angelopoulos worked with a star. Marcello Mastroianni had been in the business for thirty-five years when he took the part of Spyros, and the casting startled a director who had built his method on faces nobody recognised. It went into competition at Venice in 1986.
Spyros is a schoolmaster at the end of his working life. His daughter marries; the guests leave; he shuts the house, loads his hives onto a flatbed and drives south, following the migration route his father followed, from flowering to flowering. A young woman attaches herself to the truck somewhere along the way. Almost nothing else is announced. Mastroianni plays a man who has decided to stop explaining himself, and does it with an economy that surprised people who knew him for expansiveness; Nadia Mourouzi is the girl, unsentimental and unreadable.
The film belongs to the stretch of Angelopoulos's career when he turned from national history to private exhaustion, and it is the most intimate thing he made before Landscape in the Mist. Eleni Karaindrou's score — her second for him — became a small classic in its own right. Critics who wanted the political scale of the 1970s work were disappointed. Read forward from Voyage to Cythera instead, it is the middle movement of the finest sequence of films in modern Greek cinema.
Top Cast
Marcello Mastroianni
Spyros
Nadia Mourouzi
The Girl
Serge Reggiani
Sick Man
Jenny Roussea
Anna
Dinos Iliopoulos
Spyros' Friend
Awards, Festivals & Mentions
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Nominee — Golden Lion — Venice Film Festival (1986)
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Venice Film Festival 1986 — In Competition
