Director: Victor Erice
Writer: Victor Erice, Michel Gaztambide
Stars: Manolo Solo, Jose Coronado, Ana Torrent, Petra Martínez, María León, Mario Pardo
Synopsis: A Spanish actor disappears during the filming of a movie. Although his body is never found, the police conclude that he has suffered an accident at the edge of a cliff. Many years later, the mystery returns to the present day.
The most fascinating thing about Víctor Erice isn’t that he has directed just four feature films during his 50-year career. It’s that, without question, each one of them warrants the much-coveted, overused “masterpiece” distinction, and that it doesn’t feel even remotely overdone to award any of them such a status. For that to be the case, Erice’s films would have to be inflated in some way themselves, works that encroach upon themselves with their pompous dramatics and their unearned flair. Those words shouldn’t — and can’t — be used in relation to Erice, for his filmmaking is never anything but… well, gentle feels — and is — too trite a word, so let’s call it unobtrusive. His cinema is of a style that one might go so far as to call “fly on the wall”-ish, but even that doesn’t do his unassuming-yet-intimate skill justice. Erice is as gifted an observer as he is a storyteller, so much so that you almost forget he wrote and plotted out the same observations he films himself; only the finest auteurs can achieve such a thing.
So it’s no wonder that Erice’s first film in 31 years, the magnificent, gentle Close Your Eyes, is littered both with astonishing images and spellbinding lines, the likes of which led to multiple murmurs and audible “whoas” from audience members at this critic’s screening. It’s also no surprise to see the epic film’s director continuing to build off of the motifs that made his earliest works so lauded. In Close Your Eyes, Erice takes a meticulous and gradual approach to dissecting the meaning of memory, the beauty and pain that often come linked to our strongest relationships, and how art – specifically cinema – can often serve as a bridge between the two. In The Spirit of the Beehive, his 1973 debut, Erice depicted a young woman’s fearful obsession with the original Frankenstein film from 1910; the titular monster’s actions terrify and haunt the girl, but they also strengthen her bond with both her sister and her community. Erice’s sophomore feature, 1983’s El Sur, centers on a teenage girl whose relationship with her father has become strained due to his own drifting, something she only recognizes as a necessary means to an end when she sees him going to the movies alone, an act he feels might reconnect him to a long-lost love.
His third film, a documentary from 1992 called The Quince Tree Sun ( also known as Dream of Light), follows the Spanish painter Antonio Lopez and his painstaking efforts to paint a tree. Lopez wants his portrait to be perfect; for whatever reason, he can’t seem to properly capture the tree in all of its beauty. His connection to his art never wavers, but the frustrations remain all the same. Lopez battles an array of weather conditions, which change the tree’s appearance, all while contemplating his own mortality. In all but explicit terms, he wonders, “How much time might I have left to tell this story?”
Another question that comes to mind while watching The Quince Tree Sun: What might time itself be doing to this story? One can’t help but think that Erice might have felt a similar way while writing Close Your Eyes, a story that has evidently been gestating for years – decades is probably more likely – yet feels appropriate coming just months after the filmmaker turned 84. He may not be the most well-known octogenarian auteur working today by mainstream standards, but he’s reached a similar point to the likes of Martin Scorsese in his cinematic journey as he finds himself reckoning with an accomplished career by examining what he’s left on the cutting room floor over the years. Not only are there scripts and frames littered about, but there are partnerships and memories abound, two things that can both define a life and complicate it.
In Close Your Eyes, which Erice co-wrote with Michel Gaztambide, said reminiscence takes form in the film’s first 20 minutes, as it begins with a scene from a film-within-the-film called The Farewell Gaze. Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado), Gaze’s star, plays a not-quite-detective who is brought to a French chateau to fulfill the last request of a dying man named Mr. Levy (Josep Maria Pou): He wishes to see his daughter, who was taken from him long ago, one last time before he passes. He notes that she is the only person in the world who looks at him uniquely, and her gaze is a sensation he covets as his clock ticks. Arenas’ character, Mr. Franch, must go to Shanghai to retrieve her. It’s a simple set-up, an adventure-adjacent drama about retrieving something that was lost so that total peace can be obtained. It feels a lot like a film Erice might once have made himself.
As Franch leaves Levy’s home, which he named “Triste el Roy” (or, “The Sad King,” a nod to his favorite chess piece), to set out on his journey to find his client’s child, the frame freezes. Erice then transports us from 1990, when The Farewell Gaze was being filmed, to Madrid in 2012, where the film’s director, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), is visiting a television station to meet with the producers of a show that investigates unsolved mysteries. The enigma in question? Arenas walked off set after shooting the aforementioned scenes and never returned, causing Garay’s film to go unfinished. Arenas’ body was never found, leaving Garay and others with a bevy of questions, from “What led Julio to disappear?” to “Where has he gone?” From this point on, Close Your Eyes becomes a two-pronged procedural of sorts – Miguel’s quest to figure out whatever happened to his star and friend; and a psychological journey that may help Miguel understand his past, present, and future as he ages, encounters people from his filmmaking days, and reckons with what became of his life after The Farewell Gaze fell apart.
“I lost my best friend, and I lost my movie,” Miguel says at one point, a line that might send a lesser work into a territory that is far more fitting of the “procedural” label. The same goes for a more pointed reference to Julio that comes up during a conversation between Miguel and Arenas’ daughter, Ana (Ana Torrent, who starred in Erice’s first film just over three decades ago): “His movies will always be there… But what about him, as the person he was?” And while Close Your Eyes does see Miguel embark on a search for clues that may lead him to his long-lost friend, or at least reveal the truth about his disappearance, Erice is less interested in the mystery of Julio’s whereabouts than he is in what it means for Miguel. Solo’s performance is a remarkable balance of stoicism and pain, as he plays Miguel as a man who seems to live a simple life yet whose primary dreams were all-but ripped from his clutches when his final production fell to bits. Now, he passes the time by fishing, petting his black lab, and enjoying some late-night drinks and jokes with his eclectic neighbors. It’s not the life he imagined he’d lead, but it’s one that, until Julio reentered his mind, was all he needed.
When Close Your Eyes’ central mystery is solved roughly two-thirds into the film, Erice doesn’t take a sharp turn down Sentimentality Highway, instead opting to go even deeper into why Julio’s disappearance has long-tormented the rest of the film’s characters, even if most of them were unwilling to acknowledge how close to the surface it had risen despite remaining beneath. Much of this is thanks to Coronado’s layered turn as Julio, a man we see take multiple forms over the course of the film’s near-three-hour runtime. Without revealing too much about what has, indeed, happened to Julio, it’s safe to say that Coronado’s work is some of the most stunning, emotionally-complex acting of the year, the kind that would rebut an idea that Miguel’s projector pal Max (a fantastic Mario Pardo) raises late in the film: “Miracles haven’t existed in the movies since Dreyer died.”
The same could be said for Close Your Eyes itself, a work of miraculous technicality at times – Valentín Álvarez’s cinematography switches from 16mm film (when we’re watching The Farewell Gaze) to a gray, digital tint that doesn’t dull the picture so much as it represents Erice’s own recognition that times, they are a-changin’ – that always remains a stunning stroke of narrativization. Somehow, it manages to rival Erice’s earlier efforts, but perhaps that was always inevitable given that the film is so clearly an examination of self. It’s a more sentimental reckoning than something like The Irishman or Killers of the Flower Moon, but no less stirring in its recognition of an artist’s past triumphs and missed opportunities. If Erice feels he has squandered chances aplenty over the course of his career, the fact that audiences have been able to witness the four masterworks he’s offered in 50 years is enough of a gift to last a lifetime. After all, people come and go, but cinema lives forever. Thank goodness that Close Your Eyes falls in the latter camp.
