Erice invokes Janus: Miguel confronts a past filled with profound loss by opening doors which he thought had once been shut for good. Meetings become like time capsules and resolve with fades-to-black. A sentimental movie I found easy to forgive for its flaws because of its transparency and earnestness.
"If you're his friend, you can talk to him whenever you want. Close your eyes... and call him."
- Dialogue from The Spirit of the Beehive
Almost like a proto-New Rose Hotel, this is a movie about an emerging modernity where unseen forces mediate and obscure all manner of social and economic relations. Fassbinder's prescient concern that this new reality will succumb to and become intertwined with these forces (as opposed to being liberating or able to pull in a different direction)—and blur the line between oppositions, so much so that one will ultimately act against one’s own interests—is even more worrying with the implication that,…
A film in which a boy’s presence is replaced with images and sounds of rainfall, footsteps, and a paddle submerging into water, in which his absence is measured by the rhythms and repetitions of daily life. His omission gives way to the evolution of the family's persistence despite their futile search for answers. Even in a world which provides no clues, a world which lies to them, they continue to look. The empty boat drifting down stream is a tragic…
"To err is human"
Was there a director who understood this better than Fassbinder? What an incredibly warm and compassionate work. It's a travesty we didn't get the final three episodes, if only for the fact that we got less of Oma and Gregor. And if I knew German this would be playing in the background regularly, just because it's so full of love at every turn.
