Victor Erice made his bones with his first feature, The Spirit of the Beehive. Since then, he’s done two more features—El Sur (1983) and Dream of Light (1992)—and shot footage for film anthologies and audio/visual installations. The Spirit of the Beehive is 50 years old this year. Mr. Erice now returns with the masterful and poignant Close Your Eyes.
It extends the film-within-a-film conceit. Its protagonist is a filmmaker, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), whose last film was an opus titled The Farewell Gaze. In the middle of the production, Julio Arenas (José Coronado), its lead actor and Garay’s close friend, vanished during production and left the film unfinished. Subsequently, Garay gives up filmmaking and turns to novels. Years pass and Gary’s career sputters to a halt. Then the host (Helena Miquel) of a popular TV show, Unresolved Cases, contacts him for a feature about the puzzling circumstances.
This launches Garay on an odyssey: with the help of his former film editor, Max Roca (Mario Pardo), he takes up the mystery anew. In his travels, Garay encounters Arenas’ daughter Ana (Ana Torrent) and Lola, the woman he and Arenas love (Soledad Villamil). He will ultimately be aided further by characters played by Petra Martínez and María León, whose roles I won't reveal for fear of spoilers. Suffice it to say that newcomer Venecia Franco is a character who brings Close Your Eyes to a devastating climax.
Garay's sentimental journey becomes an engrossing riddle and a meditation on age, the caprice of memory, the fluidity of identity, and the cinema itself. Close Your Eyes revels in the past: editor Roca preserves movies in metal canisters and bemoans the end of celluloid; notes and journals are written by hand; the abandoned Farewell Gaze has its roots deep in Noir, styled on Howard Hawk's The Big Sleep, with more than an offhand reference to the classic The Shanghai Gesture.
Each step of Garay's journey peels back another layer, sometimes asking more than it answers, revealing forgotten connections and rekindling suppressed emotions. The performances are all excellent, with full commitment to Mr. Erice’s deeply personal vision.
The tableau builds in intensity and becomes heartbreaking.
Mr. Erice accomplishes this with an able cast and a skilled crew: director of photography Valentín Álvarez, editor Ascen Marchena, and art director Curru Garabal construct two worlds, the fanciful and the "actual," both as elemental as you can imagine. Their color palette is earthy and sensual, complementing Mr. Erice's framing. The original score by Federico Jusid guides us almost undetectably.
Close Your Eyes is long, almost three hours, and it flies by. The film is constructed as a series of blackouts, artful fades-to-black that end scenes suspensefully and on the right contemplative note. Footage from The Farewell Gaze bookends the film: its denouement has all the characters assembling to watch the unfinished reels.
I'm old. Victor Erice has ten years on me, but our affections align: I, too, grew up totally immersed in the enormous images projected on the screens of movie palaces. And to this day, I weigh its formative effect on me. It's an interpretation of life that Mr. Erice knows better than most and renders beautifully. Close Your Eyes is an old-school moviegoer’s delight, a sumptuous ballad to a bygone era.
This may very well be Mr. Erice's final film, and if so, it caps off a long and varied career. Close Your Eyes is a love letter to the profession compromised by screens and speed.
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Close Your Eyes. Directed by Victor Erice. 2024. From Film Movement. On cable VOD, and digital platforms. 169 minutes.