Close Your Eyes – first-look review

The very idea that there now exists in the world a new fea­ture film by the long-absent Span­ish direc­tor Vic­tor Erice is a cause for cel­e­bra­tion in and of itself. That the fea­ture, named Close Your Eyes, also hap­pens to stand shoul­der to shoul­der with the works upon which he made his name, supreme­ly-lyri­cal sto­ries that explore the pro­found inter­sec­tions between land­scape, his­to­ry and art, such as Spir­it of the Bee­hive, El Sur and The Quince Tree Sun, is noth­ing short of a miracle.

The yarn at the cen­tre of Close Your Eyes is one that is unfurled with utmost pre­ci­sion and no great haste. Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) is a one-time film­mak­er and arm­chair intel­lec­tu­al who now resides in a beach-hut in a dowdy coastal mari­na. We are shown a seg­ment of an unfin­ished film he made that he was forced to aban­don – called The Farewell Gaze and which count­ed as one of its leads the great, force­ful screen pres­ence, Julio Are­nas (José Coronado).

Miguel is forced to cast his mind back to the mak­ing of this curi­ous film, as a TV doc­u­men­tary is being made about the sud­den dis­ap­pear­ance of Are­nas in the midst of pro­duc­tion. We fol­low our soft-spo­ken gumshoe-by-proxy as he re-con­nects with the ghosts of his and Julio’s pasts, but the mys­tery of his where­abouts pre­vails despite a per­sis­tent con­cern for his wellbeing.

This first half is slow and patient, tak­ing time to allow us to mar­i­nate in the lives of these side-play­ers, and watch as we see a man grad­u­al­ly rekin­dling his own fond mem­o­ries of his time as a film­mak­er and artist. Erice sees film as an indeli­ble doc­u­ment of exis­tence, and its through a web of unlike­ly mem­o­ry-jogs and remem­brances – pho­tographs, trin­kets, post­cards – that Miguel is able to get clos­er to his miss­ing-pre­sumed-dead lead­ing man.

Despite a pro­ce­dur­al aspect to the script, as we amass details of what may have led to Julio’s depar­ture, Erice is more inter­est­ed in art­ful­ly map­ping out the mech­a­nisms of human mem­o­ry, and how cin­e­ma plays a part in how we remem­ber oth­er peo­ple as well as our­selves. Mat­ters take a strange turn, and the film shifts up into a new, more overt­ly emo­tion­al reg­is­ter, cli­max­ing in a sequence of stag­ger­ing beau­ty and tran­scen­dence. What begins as an appar­ent­ly mod­est, small-scale dra­ma, ends in a moment of ethe­re­al beau­ty, for both char­ac­ters and viewers. 

Erice sel­dom allows the dis­course between play­ers to raise above a whis­per, and the eter­nal, obses­sive frus­tra­tions suf­fered by Miguel remain inter­nalised until a final scene of both spir­i­tu­al and cin­e­mat­ic awak­en­ing. One char­ac­ter apt­ly namechecks the Dan­ish film­mak­er Carl Drey­er in this final sequence, and from here we can see that Erice still has the courage and the con­vic­tion to stage a mir­a­cle sim­i­lar to the one which still set jaws-drop­ping in 1956’s Ordet. Only this time, it’s not evanes­cent forces of spir­i­tu­al fer­vour that are able to bring a man back to life – it’s cinema.