In this Erice’s first movie in 30 years, a filmmaker’s search for his missing friend becomes a meditation on life’s unfinished chapters.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Only the fourth feature film from the legendary Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice (“Spirit of the Beehive,” 1973), “Close Your Eyes” is a heartbreaking, elegiac mystery about a famous Spanish actor who drops from sight near the seacoast in 1990 and is considered dead by suicide for decades.
When a series of events and encounters suggests that the actor, whose name is Julio Arenas (Humphrey Bogart-type Jose Coronado), may be alive and in hiding, the actor’s best friend Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), the director of an unfinished film in which the actor plays the leading man, goes on a quixotic quest to track down the truth about his friend and colleague. This will involve the aging filmmaker going on a “48 Hours”-like television show about the famous disappearance. In preparation, Miguel revisits the storeroom, where the remnants from the film, which was titled “The Farewell Gaze,” are stored. Lightly-packed Miguel dons an armor-like overcoat worn by Julio in the film and borrows a suit and tie from the wardrobe department to wear on the show. Yes, the identities of Julio and Miguel seem to merge. We see a photo of the two when they were young sailors in the Spanish Navy. Miguel contacts Julio’s adult daughter Ana (Ana Torrent, who 50 years ago played the strange little girl in “Spirit of the Beehive”) and a beautiful actress named Lola (Soledad Villamil), whom both men loved (shades of Francois Truffaut’s “Jules et Jim,” 1962). Old attractions rekindle, or at least are acknowledged. The film is a throwback, shot in marvelously grainy and vivid 16mm by Valentin Alvarez.
It begins with a scene from “The Farewell Gaze” set in 1947 at a French chateau named Triste le Roy (the king’s sadness) and involving an ailing old Jewish grandee named Levy (Jose Maria Pou) hiring a man played by Julio to go Shanghai to track down the old man’s daughter (Venecia Franco). The old man wants to be reunited with her one last time. “Close Your Eyes” is about people near the end of their lives, what they remember, regret, have lost, and wish they could do over. In this regard, the film is deeply poignant, wrenching but also sensitive, and beautiful.
Julio is not the only person in the film who has gone missing. For many years, Miguel has been living incognito in a small seacoast village, where he is known as Mike, and he lives in a fisherman’s shack adjoining a motor caravan on the beach. Within the small beach refuge is a shack inhabited by a young couple, a fisherman named Toni (Dani Tellez), and his pregnant wife Teresa (Rocio Molina). “Mike” works as Toni’s assistant aboard his small fishing boat. At night, Mike checks his laptop. The friends play cards and drink. Out of the blue, Miguel picks up a guitar and sings “My Rifle, My Pony and Me,” a tune performed by Ricky Nelson in Howard Hawks’s John Wayne-led Western “Rio Bravo” (1959), summoning more even cinematic and personal ghosts to the table. Most are welcome.
“Close Your Eyes” has a film within a film, two disappearances, one not investigated by anyone and one that has become national news, people finding talismans from the past, and even a faithful dog. Miguel, who is also a novelist, is reunited with film editor Max (Mario Pardo), with whom Miguel shares a bottle of Jack Daniels. Max’s celluloid collection includes two sequences that Miguel filmed. They look at the footage on an old Moviola editing machine, another remnant of an age lost in time. Toward the end of the story, Max is recruited to drive those cans of film to a convent-run home, where Miguel has met an old man with dementia who has lived and worked as a handyman. Miguel and the handyman whitewash the convent’s exterior, transforming it into a facsimile of a movie screen.
“Close Your Eyes,” just short of three hours, is “Cinema Paradiso” as an existential mystery. It often recalls Billy Wilder’s penultimate effort “Fedora” (1978), and is Erice’s first feature film in 31 years. It ends with a miraculous screening in a theater. Will the old man with dementia wake up and give two thumbs up, or will he not recognize a thing? Erice and co-writer Michel Gaztambide draw us brilliantly into the puzzle. Their film spins an enchanted web, a dark spell full of cinematic reminders of past lives, loves, and losses. It begins and ends with images of a two-faced Janus figure. The stone figure looks backward and forward, reminding us that time grows increasingly short.
‘Close Your Eyes’
Rating: Not rated, mature themes, profanity.
Cast: Manolo Solo, Jose Coronado, Ana Torrent
Director: Victor Erice
Writer: Erice, Michel Gaztambide
Running Time: 2 hours, 49 minutes.
Where to Watch: The Brattle
Grade: A-
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