Soon You Will be a Shadow

Chet Kozlowski — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 12:52:46 +0000

Soon You Will be a Shadow Chet Kozlowski December 3, 2024 - 07:52

Topics

Tags

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.

________________________________

Close Your Eyes. Directed by Victor Erice. 2024. From Film Movement. On cable VOD, and digital platforms. 169 minutes.

Add new comment

Noir Family Values

Chet Kozlowski — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Noir Family Values Chet Kozlowski April 20, 2023 - 10:00

Topics

Film Review

Tags

noir

Rural Noir (a.k.a. Neo Noir) is as good a genre as any to start a career. Reputations have been made on the strength of films like Blood Simple, the Coen Brothers' first official outing, and One False Move, starring and written by Billy Bob Thornton. Noir is relatively easy: all you need is shadows, a gun, and a makeup person who can make convincing bruises and crusted blood. Get decent actors and a director with an eye and you're good to go.

Noir is also easy on the budget. Both Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin and Trey Edward Shults' Krisha (which, while not technically Noir, dealt with similarly uncomfortable family dynamics) were financed by Kickstarter. The film being reviewed, Hungry Dog Blues, follows in that DYI tradition. It was made with $150,000.00 of friends' and family's money and filmed at the height of the Covid lockdown. That spells dedication for its writer, director, and ostensible star Jason Abrams, who'd been kicking around L.A. and New York doing shorts and who returned to his hometown St. Louis, MO to make his opus. That's the other ingredient for Noir: faith.

The film opens on a living room with an occupied hospital bed. A lone figure in a straight back chair sits vigil. No one moves. A man's voice tinnily makes a naked plea for help: "You have to find the money, son. You have to help me." The scene sets the tone for tragedy. Hungry Dog Blues has a provocative moral dilemma at its core: how far will you go to save your own father?

Two estranged half-brothers (Abrams and CJ Wilson) kidnap the lead witness testifying against their incarcerated father (Steven Peterman heard on voice mail) in order to prove his innocence. What ensues is a drama played out in rooms and cars, propelled by the physical look of the characters. Brother Charlie is a t-shirted hothead; Terence is a cautious, button-down family man. Their hostage Ronnie (Amy Hargreaves, recently seen in Homeland), who's used to being blindfolded and worse, has a daughter Tina, pregnant and ready to pop, played by Irina Gorovaia (memorable as the child Margot in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tannenbaums). They play out a dastardly game of red herrings and double crosses that will appeal to everybody's basest instincts.

Jason Abrams' dialogue is hard-bitten, terse, albeit a little stilted, hard for the actors to get their mouths around. Phrases are repeated -- notably "I don't see us having another choice," and "Don't f*ck with me!"-- and the acting is uneven, believable in bursts. CJ Wilson and Jim Walker, who plays a shifty business associate of Dad's, have a particularly hard time of it. Wilson, familiar from TV's The Blacklist and Netflix's The Trial of the Chicago Seven, has a sonorous voice suited for the stage, but seems uncomfortable with the physical aspect of his part.

As a director Abrams keeps the action close and compelling. He has an eye for forlorn landscapes, bolstered by Christopher Braun's sharp cinematography. Their team makes a lot out of a little. But the scenes are really kept together by inventive montage (editing credits go to Mike Mazzota and Abrams), and by John Carey's original score, which stays under the surface and subliminally fills in attitude where the script and actors don't.

The ending is a tad sentimental, and some of the plot defies logic, but one could do worse than to see Hungry Dog Blues. It's an impressive first effort and should lead to more from Abrams and company.

_______________________________________________________

Hungry Dog Blues. Written and directed by Jason Abrams. 76 minutes. Released by Freestyle Digital Media, DVD and VOD on April 25, 2023. Photo appears courtesy of Freestyle Digital Media.