Fernando Fernán Gómez made restraint worth watching, particularly as the withdrawn father in The Spirit of the Beehive. His broad comic beginnings make that quietness more interesting; we rate the actor who knows when to do less.
Fi1m perspective
In The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Fernando Fernán Gómez makes a father difficult to approach without making him easy to dismiss. His Fernando is a withdrawn beekeeper, an adult whose reserve makes sense in a film so attentive to the children's curiosity. We felt uneasy about his distance from them, because his restrained presence offers so little reassurance. There is care in the way he leaves Fernando hard to read, and we would recommend the performance for that alone.
He had spent years being less restrained. Established as a leading comic actor between the 1940s and the 1960s, he moved towards character roles in auteur cinema during the 1970s and 1980s. Knowing about the broad comedy helps us see the later quietness as a choice, rather than the limit of what he could do. His directing included the dark rural comedy El extraño viaje (1964), another reason not to mistake the withdrawn fathers and authority figures for the whole actor.
Víctor Erice's handling of the parents is crucial to why The Spirit of the Beehive works. Fernán Gómez and Teresa Gimpera are both restrained, while Ana Torrent gives the film its emotional force and Isabel Tellería makes childhood something shared between sisters. The adults remain harder to approach, but Erice does not treat them as unworthy of our attention. The film's beautiful images do sometimes hold us too far away, and the acting cannot entirely close that distance. We would not ask him to compensate by making Fernando more demonstrative.
The later parts are a useful reminder not to make Erice's father stand for every performance. In Voyage to Nowhere (1986), he played Don Arturo as well as writing and directing an adaptation of his own novel about a struggling acting troupe. Belle Époque (1992) gave him Manolo in an ensemble comedy, while The Grandfather (1998) cast him as an ageing aristocrat. Start with The Spirit of the Beehive, and resist the temptation to look only at the children.
Biography
Fernando Fernán Gómez (also credited as Fernando Fernández Gómez) was a Spanish actor, film and theatre director, screenwriter, novelist and playwright. Born in Lima, Peru, on 28 August 1921, he made his screen debut in 1943 and went on to appear in around 200 films until 2006.
He is known for roles in The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Anna and the Wolves (1973), Strange Voyage (1964, which he also directed), Belle Époque (1992), Butterfly (1999), The Grandfather (1998), All About My Mother (1999) and the television series Cuéntame cómo pasó (2001). He directed Voyage to Nowhere (1986), which he also wrote and starred in. Fernán Gómez was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy from 2000 and received numerous awards, including six Goya Awards and two Silver Bears for Best Actor.
