" Its intensely symbolic nature, while fascinating in places (the shots of schoolchildren entering the building is perhaps my favorite of the film's many "beehive" metaphors), is unfortunately sometimes a bit heavy-handed (did we REALLY need to see an actual beehive in front of the "honeycomb" window-panes? I don't think so). "
I think it was necessary, given how the father describes the "sad horror" of the beehive, to establish that he keeps bees, rather than it being a metaphor pulled out of thin air.
It's interesting that you bring up Jeux Interdits, which I agree is an absolute masterpiece and not just one of the best films about children, but one of the best about love and death, period. Like Jeux Interdits, this film isn't solely about childhood, or even mainly about childhood, even if the protagonists are children. While Jeux Interdits is about love and death, this one is, in my view, about coming to terms with the realities of brutalities in the world, most obviously in Ana's case but it's also true of the rest of the family. In the context of war and dictatorship, her parents have retreated into their own private worlds, fairly disconnected from the world around them, especially in the mother's case. They are not of the world of Franco, and choose retreat - but more broadly, the father's intellectual bent has little place in a world that, like the beehive, has no time for anything other than utilitarian concerns (postwar Spain was pretty poor, and Franco's regime was very corrupt - but beyond that, he would not have fit in anywhere obsessed with materialism). Isabel, on the other hand, embraces brutality, as shown in the scene with the cat and in her prank on Ana. She is fully of the world she inhabits and she is better adjusted to it than anyone else in the family. Ana, on the other hand, is sensitive like her father but lacks her father's more stoic temperament or his intellectual bent - in her trying to fathom why Frankenstein's monster killed the little girl, she touches upon the problem of evil, and no one is able to offer any real answers, other than the partisan's execution and Isabel's prank bringing home the reality of brutality. The dubbed narration of Frankenstein more or less offers an attempt at answering, noting the sinfulness of the doctor's actions - in this view, evil arises from disobedience, an explanation that no character even considers (again, an implicit rejection of Franco - let's not forget the quasi-fundamentalist nature of the regime - but it goes much beyond that, it's a rejection of conventional authority as the arbiter of morality, at least when that authority is based on force and violence).
Now, the balance between retreating into a private world because one rejects the brutality of the world one lives in, while remaining functional and grounded in reality, is a delicate one, and Ana seems unable to handle it (ironically, her own problems seem to wake her mother from her stupour). It's not clear if she will recover, and perhaps emulate her father's stoicism, or she will descend into full-blown madness. The latter is at least hinted when the poem is read in class about falling into an abyss, and in the next scene the girls are playing near a well (an obvious and proverbial (there's even the saying "tapar el pozo después del niño ahogado" - covering the well after the child has drowned) danger, although nobody physically falls in).
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