Close Your Eyes is Victor Erice’s old man movie, but it feels reductive to say so. It’s also his love letter to cinema, but that is an even more inadequate attribution. After all, all of the filmmaker’s works, scattered as they have been over the decades, celebrate cinematic magic in some fashion. In The Spirit of the Beehive, Erice’s 1973 debut feature that is universally considered a masterpiece of Spanish cinema, a young girl’s obsession with James Whale’s seminal 1931 horror movie Frankenstein runs parallel to an examination of the dark politics of Franco-era Spain immediately following the Spanish Civil War. Erice’s follow-up feature, El Sur, arriving a decade later, similarly looks at the aftermath of the war and its effect on relationships through young eyes. Key moments in the film revolve around a local movie theater, where a girl discovers an actress in a poster, connecting her to the woman her absent father had been pining for, reality and fantasy uncomfortably rubbing up against each other.
Close Your Eyes is only Erice’s fourth feature film. It’s also the first film he has released in over 31 years. Watching this patient, nearly three-hour work unfold, it becomes increasingly apparent that that is truly a shame— but also, what a gift that he is working at all. The film opens in 1990 on a movie within a movie. Inside a dreary country manor, a wealthy refugee from Franco’s regime summons a friend to locate his lost daughter so he can see her one more time. The film was titled The Farewell Gaze, and it was never finished. The actor playing the friend, Julio Arenas (José Coronado) vanished in the middle of production. The director, and Julio’s good friend, Miguel Garay (Manolo Soro), never made another movie.
Close Your Eyes then jumps forward to the year 2012. An investigative television series titled Unsolved Cases has reopened the mystery of Julio’s disappearance, and Miguel agrees to participate. Admittedly, his reasons are largely financial— the program offered to pay a hefty sum not just for his appearance, but for the use of clips from the unfinished film. But while in Madrid for the interview, Miguel begins to make inquiries of his own. This includes reaching out to Julio’s daughter, Ana (Ana Torrent), who barely knew her father even before he disappeared, and his editor Max (Mario Pardo), who is concerned about the TV program maintaining the correct aspect ratio for the film clips (he, in his memorabilia-cluttered workspace, has hung on to the footage for all these years) and opines that cinema lost its magic “when Dreyer died.”
If you know anything about Erice, you can see how the latter sentiment, and the character of Miguel as a whole, serve as stand-ins for the director and his career. To say that Erice’s body of work has been critically well-received feels like a vast understatement, and yet, it has been full of fits and starts. El Sur is a minor masterpiece as it stands, yet Erice had planned a whole other half of the film, only for the producer to shut production down (citing lack of funds) before he had a chance to start it. He developed and was set to direct the 2002 film The Shanghai Spell before the producer of that film snatched it from him and assigned it to another filmmaker. Even Close Your Eyes has had a bumpy road to release; the film premiered at Cannes in 2023, but Erice was not informed that it would not be included in the main competition, resulting in him having to leave potentially more substantial offers from other festivals on the table (Erice did not attend the Cannes premiere).
That frustration is manifested in Miguel, who is cut short professionally and creatively by unforeseen circumstances. Soro gorgeously and mournfully portrays the regret and weariness that accompanies such a life, no more so than in a tranquil midpoint segue in which Miguel returns from the city to his coastal home. It’s an environment that Erice and cinematographer Valentín Álvarez capture with both beauty and awe (there are some truly stunning shots of the water and crashing waves), but the isolation typically prompted by such staggering and remote surroundings is interrupted by an unexpected moment of community, which Miguel strikes up a duet of “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” with some old friends. The song is from Howard Hawks’ 1959 western Rio Bravo, a film that concerns a lone sheriff who is aided in his crusade to hold a man with powerful connections for murder by a disparate group of individuals in his community. Following this seaside sojourn, Close Your Eyes ventures down a similar path, as Miguel is aided by both old friends and new acquaintances in not only determining what happened to Julio, but rekindling a past he had long since buried.
Erice is a master of tone and mood, circumventing indulging in scenarios that otherwise may have turned treacly by allowing the interactions between his actors to play out naturally, the camera caressing faces and gestures over dialogue, which is sparingly yet thoughtfully used. For a filmmaker who has had so many roadblocks thrown at him throughout his career, there’s little that’s jaded or cynical about Close Your Eyes. Even an early scene depicting Miguel filming his interview for the true crime series largely skirts exploitation; those involved tread gingerly, and appear to sincerely desire to help in some fashion. Throughout, Erice examines the ties between cinema and memory that culminate in— where else?— a screening in an old movie theater. But perhaps the film’s most piercing example of this isn’t baked in the script, but in the casting. When she was seven years old in 1973, Torrent played the lead in Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. Watching her here, 50 years later, it’s hard not to feel like her casting is especially intentional. In the film, she plays the living link to the missing actor, while in reality, she’s the connective tissue to the promising start of Erice’s film career. On a more somber note, her presence here could also be viewed as a full circle moment, as a goodbye. I hope that I am wrong, although at now 84 years old, the large gaps between Erice’s previous films lead me to believe otherwise. But if not, what a perfectly moving punctuation to a body of work that whose sparsity belies its incredible fruits.
Close Your Eyes is now playing in select theaters, and screens locally at the Webster University Film Series in St. Louis September 13-15. Runtime: 169 minutes. Not rated.
Katie at the Movies 