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The Valley of the Bees
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Second Run Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (2nd November 2024). |
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The Film
 Having lost his mother some time ago, twelve-year-old Ondrej of Vlkov (Pavlínka's Zdenek Sedlácek) spends his days in solitude tending the bees while his father (Witchhammer's Zdenek Kryzánek) spends days out hunting stag with his dogs. When his father decides to wed Lenora (Jana Hájková), a girl scarcely older than himself, Ondrej plays a prank on their wedding day, filling an offering of a basket of flowers with bats. His father flies into a rage and throws Ondrej bodily into a wall. Immediately remorseful, his father pledges Ondrej's life in service of the Virgin. Soon after Ondrej recovers, he is inducted into the Knights of the Teutonic Order in Germany and taken under the wing of Armin von Heide (The Painted Bird's Jan Kacer). Over the years, although the order's power and influence grows, Ondrej (now Morgiana's Petr Cepek) feels as confined as the order is to their territories and by the life of self-deprivation, swearing off the temptations of women, men, and even their own bodies. When older knight Rotgier (Closely Watched Trains's Josef Somr) confesses his desire to escape the Order and return home to the riches he pledged to surrender, he asks Ondrej to come with him. When Ondrej hesitates and falls back on his teachings, Rotgier knocks him out. Rotgier is captured and Ondrej punished by confinement in his cell, only learning through overheard talk of his brothers that Rotgier has been executed by being thrown to the dogs (literally). When Armin discovers that Ondrej has escaped, he pleads the case to the elder brother (...and the Fifth Horseman Is Fear's Miroslav Machácek) that Ondrej has merely gone astray and that he will bring him back. On his own, Armin ventures out of the Order's territories into pagan Bohemia, staving off temptation (sometimes violently) all around him. When Ondrej is waylaid by highwaymen, Armin defends him in hope of convincing him to renew his faith; however, Ondrej returns to his family estate to discover it in desperate straits since his father's death and his stepmother (Larks on a String's Vera Galatíková) grown into a beautiful but fiercely-pious woman. Ondrej becomes master of Vlkov, including claiming his stepmother as his bride, but Armin devotion to God and to Ondrej's salvation will lead to disaster. Made quickly just after protracted production and during the post-production of the expensive Marketa Lazarová to take advantage of the existing sets, The Valley of the Bees – also from director Frantisek Vlácil (The Devil's Trap) and screenwriter Vladimír Körner (Adelheid) – is bursting forth with period detail and Christian characters wandering desolate, almost post-apocalyptic yet medieval pagan landscapes in the monochrome widescreen mold of Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (and may have influenced the muddy, gritty world of Roman Polanski's Macbeth), and yet it feels like a more intimate, scaled down, and stylistically-refined version of concepts explored in the prior Vlácil film. While Ondrej appears to be the protagonist, the nature of his religious journey is ambiguous. Virtually exiled from home and inducted into an order whose way of life is vastly different from his own, his homesickness is replaced with wonderment at seeing and feeling the sea for the first time. He may have already resented his father, but he grows to resent the belief that his father pledged his soul to God for his own salvation. His reluctance to help go with Rotgier or help him seems to have more to do with fear than religious conviction, as does his inability to explain to Armin why he did not stop Rotgier from running away (both say to him "May God forgive you your weakness"). While we do not see Rotgier knocking him out, we do see him do the same to Armin when he catches up with him midway through the film – and Ondrej likely also turned his back on his attacker in good faith – and reclaiming his life at Vlkov seems to involve becoming more and more like his father regardless of what he may actually feel when Lenora tells him that his father tried to save up money to buy him back from the order which might have been out of love or because Lenora is supposedly barren (although he might have been less fertile being so much older her). While Lenora's observation that he is becoming like his father when he takes his dogs out to chase down a stag seem like condemnation, there might be a masochistic edge to it since she decides to flagellate herself in the castle's stables where Ondrej will surely stumble upon her when he returns. In the tragic aftermath of the climax, we see Ondrej returning to the castle of the Teutonic Knights but we do not really know whether he is there to face his earthly punishment or to rejoin the order.  In place of scenes of Ondrej reacting to news of Rotgier's death and escaping, he is simply "replaced" at the forefront of the narrative as he is confined in his cell until the end of the Fast and Armin emerges from his own self-imposed solitude. Despite his rigidity and fanaticism, Armin proves to be an equally complex and self-contradictory character (it seems inappropriate to call him a hypocrite since he does not seem to know himself well enough). There is a degree of ambiguity as to whether the nature of Armin's attachment to Ondrej is homoerotic and to what degree Ondrej returns it, or whether Armin's attachment to the naive, younger man (boy at the start) is the need for a captivated audience to his displays of self-induced suffering – during the Fast, Armin seems more interested in Ondrej's reaction to him dumping his fish onto Ondrej's plate than his other brothers seeing Ondrej with two servings – whatever the case, Ondrej is a temptation and a distraction. Like Ondrej's father who curses Lenora for his own actions against his son due to her barrenness – and may have sensed the possible attraction/jealousy between his son and his scarcely-older bride – Armin displaces the true nature of his attraction/frustration onto others, telling a beautiful but blind coal forager (Sirius' Jana Hlavácková) to cover herself because she unknowingly tempts him, slaughtering the highwaymen he recruited to help him Ondrej, and holding down the head of an older brother to show him his "ugly" reflection when he remarks on the eagerness with which Armin drinks from a fountain after the Fast has ended. Thirst, literally and perhaps figuratively, also plays a role in Armin's personality as he claims he returned from the Crusades with an insatiable thirst; and, for all his describing "impious" Ondrej and Leonra as living like animals, he kneels on the ground before Ondrej and drinks from a muddy stream. Both the elder brother and the Vlkov village priest Father Blasius (Michal Kozuch) both call into question whether Armin is concerned for Ondrej's salvation or his own, and both seem to realize the futility of arguing with him (regardless of any potential danger to himself or others). When Armin visits the Vlkov church, Blasius seems to be complicit with his mission; however, there subsequently unfolds a dialogue in which we see Blasius pragmatic about the degree of his influence in the real world while Armin's idea of spiritual purity is so extreme that it does not allow for any human imperfection even in children ("Let it be extinct. The angels will remain"). While Blasius can attempt to persuade and manipulate, he neither warns Ondrej of Armin's motives or attempts to plead mercy for Armin when Ondrej means to set the dogs on him. The film simply ends on this incompatibility of natural and the spiritual, being of the world but looking beyond it. Vlácil's next film Adelheid, also scripted by Körner, is set in the aftermath of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia during World War II. 
Video
Little seen in English-speaking countries until the DVD era, Vlácil fans had their choice of a typically substandard Facets Video DVD stateside – a PAL-converted anamorphic transfer with burnt-in English subtitles – or Second Run's native PAL 2010 DVD which had optional subtitles but was similarly without extras apart from an indispensible booklet with an essay by Peter Hames (the Czech release had a few interiews but unlike many Czech Republic and Slovakian DVDs, it did not have English subtitles). An HD master made the rounds on Czech television while a more recent one was created from materials at the Czech National Film Archive. We have no idea which was used for the French Blu-ray but Second Run's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from the latter. As is the practice with the archive's restorations, reel change hole punches are retained but while the elements are not pristine, sharpness across close-ups, medium shots, and very wide long shots is such that the softness of other sequences – both shallow-focus close-ups like the shots that place both Ondrej during his initiation and Rotgier in supplication, as well as a few wide-angle overhead shots like the scene in which Rotgier is cornered by his brothers before his death – suggest that those were a deliberate stylistic choice rather than material patched in from inferior materials. 
Audio
The sole audio track is a 24-bit Czech LPCM 2.0 mono that sounds cleaner than the film looks, conveying both the at times soft-spoke (post-dubbed) dialogue, foley effects from the fight scenes (many of the exteriors feature little in the way of ambient sound effects), and most strongly the scoring of Zdenek Liska (The Cremator) which seems just as much the "film opera" as Marketa Lazarová in this respect with choral voices and chanting used sparingly but forcefully at those times. The optional English subtitles are free of errors.
Extras
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by The Projection Booth podcasters Mike White and Robert Bellissimo who discuss the recurring theme in the director's early films of the clash between Christian and pagan beliefs, the relationships between the characters – and whether the relationship between Ondrej and Armin is actually homoerotic – the production of the film in relation to Marketa Lazarová's five years of development and five-hundred day shoot (including the notion of a film of this subject matter as a means of making some money back in case the other more expensive film is a failure). The track is most interesting when they focus on the self-contradictory choice of the characters and the possible subtext of those decisions, and it helps that White is an avid fan of the director while Bellissimo was not familiar with him but had binged on several of his works in preparation not for this track specifically but for a forthcoming podcast episode focusing on either the director or this film specifically. The disc alos includes two of Vlácil's later short films "The City in White [Město v bilém]" (15:36) and "Karlovy Vary Promenades [Karlovarské promenády]" (15:14). 
Packaging
Carried over from the DVD edition is the 24-page booklet with an essay by critic Peter Hames who provides an overview of Vlácil's filmography, similarities of the film to Marketa Lazarová and its departures, as well as expanding on the anecdote about its creation, revealing that Körner had been inspired while location scouting for the other film and was developing the idea before Vlácil approached him about another film (Körner concurrently developed the story as a novel but would not publish it until 1978). 
Overall
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