Raetsonwe Redundant and unnecessary.

SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

l_rawjalaurence THE BEDEKEPER (L'APICULTEUR) has a straightforward plot involving the odyssey of a former schoolteacher Spyros (Marcello Mastrioanni), who embarks on a journey by lorry all over Greece and its islands to chase the honey. He ends up in his former home, now deserted, and frequents a now-deserted cinema. On the way he picks up a young girl (Nadia Mournuzi) with whom he has an on-off affair before she leaves him to embark on her travels once more.Set during the early spring, Theo Angelopoulos's film evokes a world coming to life after its winter hibernation - of showers, watery sunshine and pinkish sunsets setting over mountainous rural landscapes. Such images of future promise contrast starkly with Spyros's mental state; his beekeeping business is in decline, his wife Anna (Jenny Roussea) no longer lives with him, while he has become estranged from his daughter. It seems that he embarks on an apparently never-ending road trip because he believes he has to rather than of his own own volition.Unable to express himself except through physical acts, Spyros remains perpetually alienated from the landscape and the people inhabiting it. He visits several local communities, all of whom enjoy collective experiences of sitting outside, sipping their drinks and gossiping happily; but he can never involve himself in their lives. He remains an outsider, the object of cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis's penetrating gaze.Despite Mastrioanni's masterly performance notable mostly for its stillness rather than action, L'APICULTEUR proves an unpleasant cinematic experience. Spyros has done something in the past to alienate himself from his family; there is a suggestion that he is a actually a pedophile. On his daughter's wedding day he gathers her up in her arms in such a way as to denote excessive affection; later on he makes love to the girl on the cinema stage by smothering her, in spite of her repeated entreaties to let her go. It's as if he cannot endure the sight of young people as they remind him of his own mortality; hence he needs to deflower them of their innocence.The cinema-image is also significant, suggesting the desire to exhibit all his seamier qualities in public. Angelopoulous intensifies that sense with a scopophilic obsession with photographing the girl in the nude, the camera lovingly tracking the contours of her body in a series of shots taken from Spyros's point of view. In the end we wonder whether she functions solely as an object of the director's and the leading character's misogyny.The mood is one of unrelenting intensity that seems particularly redolent of the mid-Eighties, a time when anti-feminism was much more of an issue in Europe than it might be today. L'APICULTEUR 's certainly an art-house film, but one whose shortcomings need to be pointed out.

PoppyTransfusion This is the second film I have seen by Theo Angelopoulos and it is slow paced and introverted where much is implied, little is said and the interior lives of the characters are depicted mostly through symbol and metaphor. The plot is straightforward: An elderly man, Spyros, makes his annual spring time trip through Greece in order to cultivate his hives. During the journey he meets a young woman who attaches herself to him and the film charts their fractured journey and relationship.Spyros comes from a long male line of bee keepers who made similar journeys to the one he undertakes and over the opening credits we hear narrated a story of the hives spoken by an adult male to a male child. The story tells of the virgin bees that are kept captive their entire lives as any one of them could be a queen. It is a sad story because the female bees can never escape their imprisonment much as a person cannot escape their fate. The tale tells also of the drones that perform a ritualised dance in the presence of the queen bee who selects one to fertilise her nest. The tale is beguiling and sad and we learn later that Spyros's wife, Anna, selected him from one of three suitors suggesting she was a queen bee and him a drone.The film begins on the first day of an unusually cold spring, with snow on the ground, at the wedding of one of Spyros's daughters. The wedding scenes are amongst the most beautiful in the film; long slow pans over people in a blue room with white light. These early scenes could be a series of paintings. After the wedding we learn that Spyros and Anna are separating about which both are sad and it is in this spirit that Spyros begins his annual voyage.At his first port he picks up a young girl who is hitchhiking. She tells him 'no one is looking for me'. As they journey we glimpse scenes of the two of them together, largely illustrating her antics, Spyros's bee keeping and his occasional visit to friends and places he has frequented on previous journeys. Spyros is intrigued and troubled by his companion who appears oblivious to him and his feelings. A song that she dances to and is repeated later in the soundtrack has the line 'all by myself I'll try to make it, I'll do it my way'. The song is striking and ugly, and discordant with the rest of the soundtrack. The irony is that neither Spyros or the girl is happy alone and neither is forging an individual existence: Spyros is repeating a family pattern and the girl, who never has a name, represents a type of rootless and needy young woman.Things do not end well for Spyros or his bees. This is foreshadowed in the song of the pepper tree that Spyros sings early on and then hears as a memory when he returns to what was his childhood home. The journey becomes a descent into sorrow with his meetings a series of goodbyes along the way, the most poignant of which is with his other daughter. I agree with others who suggest the film has the flavour of a Greek tragedy made modern.The film is beautifully shot and Greece looks simultaneously seedy and quaintly exquisite. It is a difficult film because of the feelings it evokes and the demands it makes on the viewer. The acting is particularly good and Marcello Mastroianni is amazing as Spyros. He inhabits his role so completely that it seemed I was watching Mastroianni the man and not the actor. I found myself drawn to his character and enjoy films that show older people and their lives. I don't understand the film entirely or the relationship depicted between Spyros and the girl and I fear such understanding might prove elusive on future viewings. Even so I felt the need to write something about it just as I felt the urge to play the opening scenes again when the film ended. Would I recommend it? Yes, if you are patient and have imagination.

jandesimpson I cannot go for long without returning to Angelopoulos. He is,for me, quite simply, the world's greatest living director. His films generally home in on a single theme and explore it with a profundity without equal in contemporary cinema. In "Landscape in a Mist" it is the quest for the Deity. In "Ulysees Gaze" he studies the man who would put Art before human considerations. In "The Beekeeper" he considers the destructiveness that can arise if the male menopause gets out of control. His characters are constantly standing on an abyss. Either they fall like the director in "Ullyses" or they are redeemed like the children in "Landscape". Spiros (Marcello Mastroianni at his finest) is a recently retired schoolteacher who sublimates an empty future in the temporary respite of a journey with his bees to find a spring climate where they will flourish at the end of a long winter. The opening of "The Beekeeper" is masterly. We learn everything we need to know about Spiros's loneliness and the emptiness of his family relationships by observing the party that follows his daughter's wedding. It is a quiet affair at the family home. Very few words are spoken but glances particularly between Spiros and his wife tell of a lack of communication and infinite sadness. There is a moment of pure magic when the daughter catches sight of a bird in the room which neither we nor any of the other characters see. She tries unsuccessfully to catch it during which time seems to stop still as it does when people in a street in "Landscape" stand motionless looking up at falling snow. It would be misleading to suggest that the rest of "The Beekeeper" sustains the level of inspiration of its first 20 minutes. Compared with "Landscape", "Ulysses" and "Eternity and a Day" the situation is static rather than developmental. A girl hitchhiker foists herself on Spiros. At first he tries to shake her off. She is after all a rather selfish, empty headed tart, who at one point even encourages a young soldier to have sex with her in a seedy hotel room which Spiros is forced to share with her. Eventually Spiros himself seduces her in a clapped out old cinema where they are spending the night. It is an act neither of love or lust but one born of the desperation of a middle-aged man trying to regain something of his lost youthful virility. The result is self-disgust and a terrible suicide of death by stinging. The only assertive creatures in Angelopoulos's despairing world are the bees.

Martin-117 A middle aged teacher retires from his career, dedicates himself to his hobby, and embarks on a journey through Greece with his colony of bees in his lorry. Along the way he picks up a young woman hitch hiker, and a relationship develops between them that explores the depths of personal loneliness and and alienation.Both Spiros and his young passenger have lost their perspective of the future - he is living in nostalgic reminiscence of the past, while the young girl's life is one of instant gratification, she seems to be aware of neither past nor future. Their inherent inner isolation expresses itself in a series of futile, almost savagely physical attempts at forming real contact with each other, that leaves the viewer with a harrowing picture of disturbed, painful existence.This is a slow, carefully composed film, a sequence of memorable images, some visually beautiful, others showing the gritty harshness of life. There is a constant shifting between dreams and realities that leaves what actually happens shrouded in doubt, and a moody atmosphere of nostalgia that pervades the whole film.An exceptional film that should not be missed by patient and observant people interested in the exploration of human feelings.