The film follows the journey of Spyros, a beekeeper, to various parts of Greece after his daughter's wedding. Spyros has just retired as a teacher and sets out on his annual journey in spring to move his beehives to a series of locations with flowering plants. A girl hops on Spyros's truck, and travels with him. They visit Spyros's old friends and his wife along the way, and finally arrive at a theater owned by one of his friends, which is about to be sold. There, Spyros and the girl finally have an erotic encounter, long after Spyros has tried to coerce her into kissing but failed. The girl leaves after a few nights, before the movie ends with Spyros turning over his beehive boxes, causing him to be stung repeatedly by the understandably angry bees. The final scene sees the dying Spyros tapping on the ground, as he continues to suffer from more and more agonising stings, which reminds us of the tapping of his sick friend before Spyros left him[when?] in the hospital.
Janet Maslin criticized The Beekeeper in 1993, writing that it "wastes Marcello Mastroianni in his title role" and that "(n)ot even those inclined to dwell on the film's occasional honeycomb imagery or its heavy sense of foreboding will find much to command the attention," arguing that The Beekeeper is interesting only in the context of Angelopoulos's other two titles in his "trilogy of silence" (which also includes Voyage to Cythera and Landscape in the Mist).[4] It was also written in Time Out that the film "has a stately pace and a shortage of event or information that are a lot to take."[5]John Gillett for a London Film Festival screening praised The Beekeeper as having "wonderfully textured images by Arvanitis, a succession of beautifully sustained traveling shots, and an emotional intensity which moves to a grave, overwhelming climax."[6]
Ronald Bergan, in his obituary of Angelopoulos, described The Beekeeper as a "compelling film" which "could be called a metaphysical road movie".[7] In The Independent, however, Holly Williams in 2010 lauded the film as "ponderously paced but poignant" and stated that "the directing is assured, and the performances restrained and heartbreakingly believable."[8] Acquarello of Strictly Film School[9] called the work "a haunting, compassionate, and profoundly melancholic portrait of isolation, dislocation, estrangement, and obsolescence," referring to it as an "indelible chronicle" of the contemporary Greek society.[10]
