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Movies

****”The Spirit of the Beehive.” Connoisseur. $69.95. 1973.

One of the loveliest, most haunting child performances in the history of the cinema was given by 8-year-old Ana Torrent in this neglected Spanish masterpiece. Torrent plays the daughter of an alienated intellectual and beekeeper (Fernando Fernan Gomez), a Castilian village girl whose life, under the new Franco dictatorship, is a series of dreary provincial routines. Rebelling against the monotony, she creates a private mythology around the image of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster--whom she has seen, dubbed in Spanish, in a movie show and whom she firmly believes is still alive, somewhere in the dark woods or endless fields. The film is one of only two directed by Victor Erice, a great little-known filmmaker whose style has a rapt austerity, control and beauty that recalls Ozu, Bresson or Tarkovsky. The stunning color images are by cinematographer Luis Quadrado. People sometimes complain about “Beehive’s” contemplative pace, but no one who sees this film ever forgets it.