Close Your Eyes is the kind of movie you hope lives up to its lore. The film is an epic of sorts from Víctor Erice, the Spanish filmmaker who delivered one of the most celebrated arthouse film debuts with 1973’s The Spirit of the Beehive and has made fewer films than Terrence Malick in the 50 years since. Close Your Eyes is the first feature-length project from Erice since 1992 and his first fiction film since a decade before that. There was a Cannes controversy when it premiered there last year—Erice was displeased his grand return to the world stage didn’t result in competition placement—and one hoped it would be a Thin Red Line-caliber return to form. The good news is, it doesn’t disappoint and is an extremely nourishing new supply of Erice after being deprived for so long. It doesn’t wildly overcome or slyly subvert expectations but it’s still a very well-executed and moving version of what Erice set out to make.
The film iterates on it and its author’s absentee status: protagonist Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) directed a film in 1990 starring close friend and collaborator Julio Arenas (José Coronado), an ostensibly beloved actor who he first met serving in the Spanish Navy. Julio is troubled and an alcoholic, and we learn that whilst shooting that movie, he disappeared and has been presumed dead despite a body never having been located. Mostly set in 2012, Close Your Eyes follows Miguel’s growing curiosity in piecing together the past, reintroducing the film, entitled The Farewell Gaze, that “never existed” (it was never given a proper release) to the world, and exploring how Julio’s death impacted him and the others in the thespian’s life.
It’s a narrative with a lot of hooks that could be hoary or corny if it’s not executed right. Potentially risibly, the movie is haunted by the cinema of the past; someone flips through a little motion comic that illustrates the Lumière brothers’ The Arrival of a Train, there are references to Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo and Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night and characters exclaim things like “Miracles haven’t existed in movies since the day Dreyer died!” A tender belief in the Power of Cinema is certainly expressed, but crucially, never in a saccharine way. The moment the film ends on, and exactly how much magic allowance it will give cinema and art at large, are quite thoughtful and restrained.
But like Kleber Mendonça Filho’s great recent documentary Pictures of Ghosts, this is still at its core a tribute to the persuasive power and life-changing capabilities of artwork, mostly movies. Films and songs (there are three equally riveting and emotionally charged serenades here) are memory-dredging archeological objects with soul-awakening properties. The characters opine the relics culture that have seemingly faded way — in a bit of an on-the-nose touch, Miguel’s debut novel is entitled The Ruins (he never made a film after Julio’s disappearance but he’s written a handful of books in the 22 years since). A wizened nun bemoans a disinterest in tango tunes and Miguel’s celluloid-obsessed pal Max (Mario Pardo) doesn’t think anyone cares about film like they used to.
The film is so in love with cinema that it stunningly begins and ends in a film within the film — about the first and last 15 minutes are clips from The Farewell Gaze, which, in addition to just being an enjoyably misdirecting and playful way to start and finish, allows Erice to sublimate some of the themes and a few of the more sweeping emotions into this secondary text.
Erice, cinematographer Valentín Álvarez, and editor Ascen Marchena’s style is gentle and unobtrusive, full of delicate dissolves and gorgeous lighting. It’s paced quite deliberately, with little discernible urgency. Their light touch works well with material this inherently melodramatic; you don’t need to underline anything too much with the aesthetic when the story and themes are this boldfaced. In a lovely way, Close Your Eyes matches in cadence Miguel’s temperament as an aging, quiet-lived guy on the other side of 70. Most of the characters here are all too aware of time’s march — the cast’s visages are an array of creases, well-worn expressions and sunken eyes (though nobody beats the kindly, insect-like peepers of Solo).
Despite all of these brilliant elements, Close Your Eyes does frequently feel like it’s on the verge of being something truly transcendent and never quite gets there. You’re waiting for it to deepen just a bit more or become just a bit more complex or thorny. Instead, Erice settles for a backward-looking elegy where memories are only a part of the whole picture, that reaffirms most cinephiles’ value sets without doing much challenging. Still, it’s an immensely pleasurable and rich ode to film culture, getting older and the inextricable ideas therein.
Photo courtesy of Film Movement
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