The Beekeeper is the second panel of the “Trilogy of Silence” (set between Voyage to Cythera and Landscape in the Mist) and is perhaps the Greek master's most claustrophobic work, a winter Kammerspiel disguised as a road movie that moves at the tetanic speed of a glacier. It is a film that attacks the viewer not with action, but with its absence; not with dialogue, but with the crushing weight of its stasis. It is 1986, but this is not the world of Reaganite excess. It is a gray, wet non-place, a post-historical purgatory where the only thing that moves is the rain, and the only thing that can be heard is the hum of the past.

The stroke of absolute genius, the act of meta-textual deconstruction that elevates the film to a masterpiece, is the choice of Marcello Mastroianni. Angelopoulos takes the icon of European vitality, the symbol of Mediterranean coolness, Fellini's alter ego, the man of La Dolce Vita and 8½, and empties him. He dehydrates him of all traces of charisma. His Spiros is not a character; he is a shell, a casing that moves by inertia. His silence is not the stoic silence of a Western hero; it is the silence of ontological exhaustion. To see Mastroianni, whose face was a map of desire, reduced to this mask of cosmic weariness is an act of cinematic violence. Angelopoulos dissects Mastroianni, stripping him of his cinematic “life” to show us the man who remains when the limelight fades and only the grayness of the provinces remains. It is an autopsy of the postwar European male, and the verdict is: death by consumption.

The structure is that of an anti-Odyssey. The film opens with a ritual (his daughter's wedding), the last act of a bourgeois life that Spiros has endured. And then, the escape. But it is not an escape towards something. It is a regression. Spiros, the beekeeper (the Melissokomos), loads the hives onto his truck and begins his annual journey, following the flowering from the north to the south of Greece. But this is not a journey of rebirth; it is a funeral rite. He is literally carrying his history, his legacy (the bees), to their death. Angelopoulos' Greece is not that of tourist postcards, it is not the blue of the Aegean. It is the Greece of wintery Epirus, of anonymous industrial cities, of wet highways, of mud. The director's famous, relentless sequence shots (choreographed by the divine Yorgos Arvanitis) do not capture beauty; they capture the duration of despair. His camera does not move, it waits. It waits for the emptiness to manifest itself.

Along the way, Spiros seeks connections, but his world is dead. His is not just a personal crisis; it is the failure of a generation. He visits his old comrades from the communist resistance (including a heartbreaking cameo by Serge Reggiani), only to find ghosts. The ideology that held them together has dissolved. Political utopia has failed, leaving only sick old men in deserted cafes. The polemos (war) is over, and pathos (suffering) is all that remains. It is in this context that the encounter with The Girl (Nadia Mourouzi) takes place. She is the exact opposite: she is the present. She is noise (her rock music), she is chaotic movement, she is superficial desire. She is modernity without history invading Spiros's truck-sanctuary. Angelopoulos brutally denies any cliché à la Lolita. There is no redemption through youth. Their interaction is a clash between two silences: his, heavy as lead; hers, empty as ether. Their attempt at physical connection is one of the most desolate moments in the history of cinema: it is not eroticism, it is entropy; it is the failed attempt of two solitudes to generate warmth, ending up producing only more coldness.

If Tarkovsky uses the elements (water, fire) to suggest a spiritual metaphysics, Angelopoulos uses them to show material collapse. The incessant rain does not purify; it erodes. And then there is the sound. The buzzing of bees. It is the only thread that connects Spiros to the world, the sound of his past, of tradition, of nature. But in the end, even this link is broken. Spiros does not commit suicide; he dissolves. In a final act of desperation that is also a liberation, he destroys his beehives. He is destroying his history, his burden. And the bees, his legacy, envelop him. They do not kill him; they reabsorb him. The last sound we hear is the buzzing that becomes deafening, the sound of nature/history that finally overwhelms the silence of man. The Beekeeper is a ruthless work, a visual poem about time standing still, about the impossibility of escaping one's own history, and about the terrifying beauty of emptiness. It is Angelopoulos at his darkest zenith.