Jose Coronado plays movie star Julio Arenas in “Close Your Eyes.” Film Movement Hide caption
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Spanish director Victor Erice is one of Europe’s most respected yet least prolific filmmakers: in the last nearly 50 years, he has directed just four feature films, starting with his masterful debut, The Spirit of the Beehive.
The film is a haunting family drama set in 1940, during the early days of the Franco dictatorship, and also a passionate ode to cinema from a director who has always loved it, even if the movies never returned the love for him.
Elice struggled with the 1983 film “El Sur,” which was a beautiful piece of work but was released unfinished and cut short. Since then, Elice has directed numerous projects, including the 1992 documentary “Quince Tree Sun” and several short films.
But he’s struggled to get another full-length fiction film off the ground until now. The release of Erice’s new film, Close Your Eyes, is welcome news, if not one of the best I’ve seen this year. Manolo Soro plays a retired director named Miguel, who left the industry in 1990 after one of his films was cancelled. The circumstances were shrouded in mystery: his star, the handsome actor Julio Arenas, disappeared for no apparent reason and was presumed dead. As of 2012, a Madrid-based TV journalist is investigating Julio’s disappearance.
After his interview, Miguel stays in Madrid to conduct his own investigation. Close Your Eyes unfolds slowly, over nearly three hours, but with the charm of a well-written detective story. Miguel reaches out to old friends and colleagues, including his longtime editor, Max, a die-hard cinephile who still has access to unseen footage from an abandoned production.
Miguel is also reunited with Julio’s daughter, who knew very little about her father before he disappeared, and she’s played to perfection by Ana Torrent, who was just a girl in Spirit of the Beehive decades ago. It’s a wonderful moment of throwback.
Miguel’s investigations don’t immediately provide any answers, and he returns pensively to his home on the Spanish coast. Here, the action pauses for a moment and simply settles into a magical interlude: lounging under the stars one night, Miguel picks up his guitar and performs a duet with his friend Toni. If you’ve ever seen Howard Hawks’ 1959 Western, Rio Bravo, you’ll recognize this song. It’s one of my favorite movies.
Perhaps that’s also Erice’s work. Like Rio Bravo, Close Your Eyes is a story about community, and friendships forged under impossible circumstances. Miguel’s mission to solve the mystery of Julio’s disappearance becomes a collaborative effort, as friends old and new come together to help him.
You don’t need to know Erice’s work to be drawn into Close Your Eyes, but for those who do, this new release will be an excruciatingly moving experience. Erice is, in many ways, telling his own story; Miguel could be his stand-in, just as Miguel’s unfinished film feels like a meta-commentary on some of Erice’s own abandoned projects. Miguel and his old editor Max reminisce about an earlier, better time in the film industry and complain about the changes brought about by digital technology.
But despite his characters’ pessimism, Erice continues to demonstrate an unwavering faith in cinema; he knows that movies can move us in ways no other art can. At one point, Erice leads all his characters to a rundown old cinema, where Close Your Eyes becomes not just a fascinating film, but quietly transcendent. I don’t want to say too much about what happens, but it’s worth discovering for yourself in your own cinema.
