The Valley of the Bees

The Valley of the Bees -- Ridiculously grim, The Valley of the Bees aspires to imitate Bergman's The Virgin Spring or Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, but, in fact, the picture that this movie most resembles is Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Frantisek Vlacil, a Czech director, made this film in 1967 and the picture is handsomely produced and effectively, if monotonously, acted. Things get off to a bad start in the first five minutes: at the Castle of Vikow in Bohemia, 12 year old Ondrej's father is celebrating his wedding. The old man is marrying a smirking girl who seems to be about Ondrej's age. Ondrej graciously brings a big basket full of white flower-blossoms as a wedding gift. Unfortunately, the lad has buried about a half-dozen groggy bats in the petals and when the basket is dumped the bats fall all over the table. Understandably, Ondrej's father is upset. He picks up the boy and throws him about a dozen feet into a stone wall, knocking the kid unconscious and, perhaps, killing him. The old man vows that if his son survives he will make the boy into a monk to serve the Virgin Mary. The boy recovers and, a dozen years later, we discover him among a group of vicious, half-demented religious fanatics at a monastery on the Baltic Sea. (These Taliban-like knights wear tin-pot helmets and chainmail emblazoned with big Teutonic crosses -- they are cousins to the Teutonic knights that threatened Mother Russia in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky; Eastern bloc communist-era films are reliably, and schematically, anti-clerical.) Ondrej spends a lot of time bathing nude with his close friend and mentor, Armin, and the movie implies that the relationship is homosexual -- at least as far as Armin is concerned. (The two young men lie in the icy surf naked, thrashed by waves until they gloat that their lower bodies are completely numb.) After another monk tries to escape the monastery and is fed to the hounds for his sins, Ondrej decides to flee himself. He makes his way back to the old castle at Vikow, now fallen on hard-times. Ondrej's father, we learn, got his eye poked out while riding with his dogs to the hunt, fell from his mouth, and was eaten by his hounds -- being devoured by dogs is a motif repeated over and over again in this movie. Ondrej's stepmother, after dutifully flagellating herself for a while, seduces the handsome young man and, on their wedding day, Armin, who has been searching for his boyfriend, shows up with wholly predictable consequences. The film features many bare Romanesque interiors, white-washed walls and bleached paving stones, doors and openings in the castle overexposed into brilliant flares of radiance and there are long Glagolithic dialogues, suitably morose, with much staring and downcast eyes. Various animals are murdered and the somber Ondrej spends much time with his bee hives, conical menhirs to which bat carcasses are nailed -- he tells the local priest that he only gets stung "ten or twelve times" each afternoon when he tends to his bees. There is an impressive sword battle with some men making charcoal -- the fighting takes place in the dark around conical heaps of burning peat (they look like the beehives) that leak smoke onto the combatants. Many of the shots are austerely symmetrical and frontal and the soundtrack drones with Gregorian chant. In one scene, Ondrej asks where the castle's vicious dogs have gone. He is eating a sinister-looking stew with a crowd of wizened old ladies. His stepmother says that the dogs are gone. Ondrej throws aside a 12th century tortilla onto he was about to slop some of the stew with disgust. Does he think that the dogs were butchered to make the dish that he is now eating? At one point, Ondrej's stepmother pronounces a prayer suitable to the film's morbid tone: "Don't let the werewolf poison our water," she prays, "and don't let the snakes curdle our milk."