Much like Terence Malick’s return to feature filmmaking after a 28-year hiatus with 1998’s The Thin Red Line, the return of celebrated Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice to our big screens with Close Your Eyes offers cinephiles much reason to celebrate. In Erice we have one of our most patient, poetic, observant filmmakers; he stands alongside Abbas Kiarostami, Theo Angelopoulos, Manuel de Oliveira and Malick himself not only as a master of form but as an artist who reaches for the transcendental. His filmography may not be as vast as those filmmakers’ but each of his four feature films, including his incompleted El sur (1983), can easily be considered a masterpiece.
Not that Erice hasn’t kept busy since Dream of Light (1992; also known as The Quince Tree Sun), his ode to light and the search for perfection in something as simple as a quince tree. He has contributed short and medium-length films on such collective features as Celebrate Cinema 101 (1996); worked alongside Kiarostami in the 2006 installation Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondences, which included the medium-length film La Morte Rouge; and contributed another medium-length film, Vidrios partidos, to the anthology film Centro Histórico, which included works by Manoel de Oliveira, Pedro Costa and Aki Kaurismaki. Some critics consider Erice’s return to feature-length filmmaking as a swan song of sorts. I hope that is not the case: de Oliveira continued making films until his death at the age of 107; Erice just turned 84.
Film may be at the heart of Close Your Eyes, but do not think of this as your archetypal love letter to cinema. Close Your Eyes is also about memory and identity and how film, or for that matter art, plays a role in preserving the former and reaffirming the latter no matter how hard we deliberately try to forget or how our own minds and bodies betray us by erasing every shred of those memories and that identity that makes us unique. Erice, who wrote the script with Michel Gaztambide (known by Spanish cinema fans as the co-writer of Julio Medem’s 1992 surreal feature debut Cows) takes his own sweet time in exploring these ideas while inviting us to be patient observers and listeners. It is a generous film, where even the producer and host of an Unsolved Mysteries-like show is treated with decency and respect. Where something as simple as going fishing in the morning or sitting around at night playing a guitar and singing an old movie Western song is as important to these characters’ lives as solving the mystery behind the disappearance of an old friend many decades ago.
Close Your Eyes opens and closes with a film within a film: the opening and closing scenes of The Farewell Gaze, Miguel Garay’s (Manolo Soro) second feature film, which he had to abandon after his best friend and lead actor Julio Arenas (José Coronado) disappeared during its making in 1990. The film takes place in 1947 and opens at a French country estate named “Triste Le Roy” (“The Sad King”) owned by a Spanish refugee of Jewish descent who asks a man named Franch, an anarchist who helped many Jews cross the Pyrenees into Spain to escape Nazism, to travel to Shanghai and bring back his only daughter. Both this and the closing scene of that fictional film are shot in 16mm by Valentín Álvarez, offering a sharp contrast to the brighter images shot in digital for the rest of the film. Erice and Valentín are not only being truthful to the period in which The Farewell Gaze was shot but in shifting from celluloid to digital Erice underscores that sense of loss that permeates the whole film. Digital cinema no longer gives artisanal filmmakers like him the opportunity to manipulate light as they please; it is a craft that is slowly fading into obscurity, wiped away by the sands of time.
Fast forward to 2015: Miguel returns to Madrid to participate in an episode of that Unsolved Mysteries show dedicated to Arenas’ disappearance. He gave up filmmaking after the disappearance and has spent most of his life writing a couple of novels and short stories, and translating books about film to Spanish. He lives in a small seaside commune in Almería and spends his mornings fishing and in the company of his neighbors and dog. The money the program is paying him is good, but it also forces him to reconnect with those closest to him, to Julio and to the film, to literally dig out the past as he unearths from his storage unit those cans containing what little he shot plus notes and photos for that television show.
A ghost haunts this visit to Madrid; the ghost of what could have been, of missed opportunities, had Julio not vanished in thin air. Max, Miguel’s former film editor (a magnificently droll Mario Pardo), lives among cans full of 35mm prints, laments how most of film’s history is in a format that hardly anyone projects, and that miracles in cinema died with Dreyer. Julio’s daughter Ana (Ana Torrent, who played a young girl also named Ana in Erice’s 1973 debut The Spirit of the Beehive) regrets not having known her father better, a man who was as well known for his philandering as for his acting. And then there’s Lola (Soledad Villamil, The Secret of Their Eyes), the tango singer both Julio and Miguel had a crush on and who went on with her life, marrying and moving to California, then divorcing her husband and moving to Buenos Aires before returning to Madrid. Julio, though, is not the only absence felt by Miguel; there’s the haunting memory of his son, who died in a hit-and-run accident.
Which is why the film’s middle section, with its calm sequences of Miguel and neighbors going on with their lives, is so important. This is Miguel’s life now, one full of small pleasures, where the miracle of living one more day is more than enough. It also prepares the audience for the revelations to come in the film’s final third. Not exactly the calm before the storm, although this middle section narratively offers Miguel the respite, the peace of mind, he needs for what’s next. Any other director would have squeezed the potential melodrama out of the revelations to come. Not Erice.
I don’t want to go into any details but you pretty much know walking into the movie that Miguel will eventually find out what happened to Julio. I won’t spoil how and under what circumstances; suffice it to say that the events in this final hour are treated with the same kind of generosity, humanity and tact. That Erice ties together the connections between memory, identity and, yes, film in a way that is both heartbreaking and logical. The film closes with that final sequence of the film that never was and one image, projected on the screen of a shuttered movie theater that calls back the films of the post-Franco era and questions if those connections are as tidy as we like to think they are.
Close Your Eyes is, perhaps, Erice’s most personal film. He seems to be questioning his own life as a filmmaker, the decisions made, the films abandoned. Like all his films (and those of the aforementioned Malick), they deserve revisiting over and over and over again. Let’s hope we don't have to wait that long for Erice’s next feature.
Close Your Eyes is playing for a limited exclusive run at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
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