Read the Spanish version Cerrar los ojos of this review.
It has been 30 years since Victor Erice won the Cannes Jury Award with his mesmerizing salute to art and the artistic process, El Sol del Membrillo (Dream of Light/The Pear Tree Sun, 1992), preceded by Spanish classics The Spirit of the Beehive (1972) and El Sur (1983). In the long interval, Erice has made short films and other. But as the director-writer Miguel of Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos) morosely remarks, writing short stories is entertainment; writing a novel is serious business. And so it is with this fourth feature, a long and serious rumination on the value of art – whether in the form of movies, music, photographs, dance – and the heightened emotional response it evokes in those attuned to its message.
The Proustian undertones also emerge strongly – though never so blatantly that they hit you over the head – in another theme that runs through the film, that of recapturing lost time, particularly one’s youth and early ambitions along with the people who once mattered so much, only to be lost in fading memories over the passing years. Close Your Eyes is the frantic search to recover memory and sensations that belong to another period of life, and the optimism that this is possible, with effort.
Erice’s many fans will be surprised at the sheer amount of storytelling that keeps the film (almost three hours long) running smoothly, especially after the non-narrative brilliance of Dream of Light. Here Erice and his cowriter Michel Gaztambide, whose recent credits include several thrillers, tease the audience with a classic mystery/adventure opener with a whiff of The Maltese Falcon. In a remote chateau called Triste-le-Roi (literally, the sad king) sometime after the Second World War, the dying Monsieur Levy summons a private investigator to find his half-Chinese daughter and bring her back from Shanghai so he can see her gazing at him one last time.
But no sooner does the viewer slip into this familiar storyline than the rug is whisked away and the modern world appears in its crisp colors and busy rhythms. A grungy, gray-haired filmmaker in a baseball cap, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) has come to the TV studio of the show “Unsolved Cases” to sell his story about an actor who went missing 22 years earlier. It becomes apparent that the missing man is the intense Julio Arenas (José Coronado) who played the investigator in Miguel’s last, unfinished film, The Farewell Gaze, and his appearance in the first scene was a film-within-the-film.
As Miguel goes over the case with the TV host (Helena Miquel), the known facts are few. Julio had been nervous on the set in the last weeks before his disappearance; his shoes and car were found on a cliff; the police had archived the case as an accident, though suicide couldn’t be ruled out. Miguel is interviewed for the show but nothing new turns up.
However, this ghost from the past stimulates out-of-towner Miguel to look up his old friends in Madrid, like Max his wonderful film editor, his old flame Lola who was also Julio’s lover back in the 1960’s, and Julio’s adult daughter Ana (significantly played by a ghost from Erice’s past, Ana Torrent, the child actress in The Spirit of the Beehive). Each encounter stirs up the old memories and brings him closer to the personal pain he has been hiding from.
Because Miguel, whose last film was 22 years ago, has dropped out of society and lives like a hippie hermit on a remote beach, fishing and singing cowboy songs with his neighbors after dinner, growing tomatoes and writing those entertaining short stories in his trailer on beach. The whole long sequence explaining this is a rather weird interlude that brakes the story’s momentum sharply, just as it is about to unveil its central mystery.
The film regains strength in the final hour as the twin themes of memory and identity come to the fore, and Erice brings the film full circle in a bold and surprisingly emotion-packed ending, which offers closure on the right notes of hope and love. So despite all the sophisticated use of meta-cinema and constant cross-references between fiction and reality, the ending is as moving as it is unexpected.
In the two main roles, Manolo Solo and José Coronado are studies in contrasts. Solo’s Miguel looks shell-shocked by life and its tragedies, yet he finds the energy to engage again and push through, this time in the investigator’s role; Coronado’s enigmatic Julio is frozen in time without an identity, not knowing who he is or who he was. Torrent and the rest of the female cast, who include two nuns, are strong and articulate women who know their power. Yet all the characters seem conditioned by the dark history of their country, from M. Levy’s reference to the Holocaust and the Franco years in Spain and later the military regimes in Argentina. It is part of their collective memory and identity that broadens the individual portraits.
Director: Victor Erice
Screenplay: Victor Erice, Michel Gaztambide
Cast: Manolo Solo, José Coronado, Ana Torrent, Helena Miquel, Maria Leon, Soledad Villamil, Ginés Garcia Millan
Producers: Cristina Zumárraga, Pablo E. Bossi, Víctor Erice, Jose Alba, Odile Antonio-Baez, Agustín Bossi, Pol Bossi, Maximiliano Lasansky
Executive producer: Cristina Zumárraga
Cinematography: Valentin Alvarez
Editing: Ascen Marchena
Art director: Curru Garabal
Costume design: Helena Sanchis
Music: Federico Jusid
Sound design: Ivan Marin
Production companies: Almost Blue Films in association with Tandem Films, Nautiflus Films, Pecado Films, La mirada del adios A.I.E. with Pampa Films
World Sales: Film Factory Entertainment
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Premiere)
In Spanish
169 minutes
