Public Republic

Ellie Ivanova Ponti

Photo: Felix Francis

I recently had the chance to see a 1973 film which I had been long looking for, The Spirit of the Beehive by Victor Erice. I recommend it to every fan of Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006).

Maybe the Labyrinth was not meant to be a tribute to the Beehive, but even the key words in the title bear an ideological parallel. Spirit/Pan, Labyrinth/Beehive. The similarities are interesting, considering that both movies are great.

In both of them, a girl goes through a scary series of trials, product of her imagination spurred by gruesome reality and cinema/literature (a Frankenstein movie and fairy tales, respectively). The troubled imaginary world in which she is lost is closely related to the political reality around her; she practically interprets it through the symbolic language provided to her by fairy tales/horror movies/the words of grown-ups.

Predictably, there is a monster in both ones, a metaphor for war or a dictator (Franco). Fairy tales for those girls explain the world’s ambiguities and conflicts. The differences are revealing, though. In The Spirit of the Beehive, the family lives in a house strangely similar to a beehive controlled by an invisible master – a beehive like the one the father keeps, observes and is totally occupied with.

There is practically no escape of it as Ana, the protagonist, learns when she runs away from home to avoid confronting her father about helping an unknown war deserter. In Pan’s Labyrinth the labyrinth is like the forest where the anti-Franco resistance fighters hide and where the little girl, Ofelia, goes for instructions on how to confront the scary, unexplained world and make sense of it. So this difference in the way of using the supernatural makes for a different outcome.

One film (Labyrinth) is designed to console, the other (Beehive) to terrify, opposite to the actual real-life outcome for the respective protagonist in each movie. Ofelia dies but then goes to the beautiful underworld as a long-lost princess who finds a way back to her real family. Ana comes back home but is emotionally wounded and further detached from her own one.

The end leaves the audience of the Beehive with a sense of oppressive calm, while the Labyrinth concludes with a comforting resolution of the plot’s intense urgency. All this combined with excellent visual work in both films, including the use of light and darkness; just pleasure for the eyes.

They made me think about other examples of narratives where children protagonists are lost in a scary or weird world and whether they win or lose in the end and how they make sense of it. Little Red Riding Hood comes to mind, as well as my favorite Alice in Wonderland, The Golden Compass, The Devil’s Cake.