‘Close Your Eyes’ Reintroduces a Major Spanish Filmmaker
Some five decades separate director Victor Erice’s debut film, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), and his latest, Close Your Eyes. In between these twin professional highlights, there are two other features — El Sur (1983), a work haunted by the fact that filming was halted before a key scene was shot, and the brilliant documentary Dream of Light (1992) — as well as a half dozen or so shorts and anthology contributions, video installations and several potential projects snuffed out before they could start. That first movie, however, had already secured the Spanish filmmaker his place in cinema history, telling the story of a six-year-old girl obsessed with Frankenstein while civil war wages on around. Its mixture of sensitivity and social commentary, imaginary horrors as sanctuaries from real-life ones, made it one of the most influential coming-of-age movies ever made; everything from Ratcatcher to Pan’s Labyrinth owes it a huge debt.
The Spirit of the Beehive became both highly celebrated and endlessly trotted out as Exhibit A for Erice never reaching his true creative potential, with the rest of his work confined to live in the shadows of an out-of-the-gate masterpiece. If you had followed his career and knew about the starts and stops, the industry screwing-overs and abandoned films, there’s a temptation to reduce him to an arthouse martyr. “What happened?” was a common question asked about Erice’s scant filmography. Close Your Eyes is, among many other wonderful things, the reply. It’s the equivalent of a 50-years-in-the-making answer record.
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The meta-ness of it all starts early. Close Your Eyes begins with a cold open, making viewers believe they’re watching a WWII thriller about a wealthy man (Josep Maria Pou) who’s summoned a fixer of sorts. His visitor has secretly transported Jews to safety as the Nazis keep pushing into Europe, and he’d like to hire him to find his daughter, living under an assumed name in Shanghai. No sooner has the stranger accepted this job than we’re told this is a clip from a legendarily unfinished movie from 1990 known as The Farewell Gaze. This detective type is really an actor named Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado), who was known as a matinee idol and a bit of a ladies’ man. In the middle of filming this potboiler, Arenas disappeared. No explanation was given, no body ever found. The shoot was halted. All that remained of the movie were two completed sequences.
Many years later, Gaze‘s director, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), is contacted by a TV show called Unresolved Cases. They want to do an episode centered around Arenas’ disappearance. Given that Garay was not only the star’s collaborator but also a friend, going back to their youth in Spain’s navy, would he be willing to be interviewed? The filmmaker essentially quit the business once the plug was pulled on his project. Since then, he’s written a few books and lived a modest life in a small house by the sea. Yet Garay agrees to go on the show, even if it means entertaining ridiculous conspiracy theories that Arenas was killed because he slept with the wrong powerful person’s wife, or that his possible death wasn’t an accident but a suicide.
What may or may not have happened to Arenas is the mystery that drives the first half of Close Your Eyes, but Erice isn’t interested in delivering a whodunnit or a whydidhedoit. You could qualify its initial stabs at what might have happened as pieces in a puzzle film, but the picture that’s making itself apparent as more elements are added isn’t really about an M.I.A. actor. It’s about what happens when your artistic efforts are thwarted or simply stopped midway through. There are two filmmakers sifting through the temples and rubble of careers that have taken unexpected turns, and only one of them is onscreen.
You don’t have to know about Erice’s own backstory to appreciate this mournful, seeking work about life, art, loss, and the space where they all overlap. Thanks to Solo’s pensive, sad-eyed take on a director who’s forced to reckon with his past, as well as the movie’s extended sequences of slowburn conversations that are as compelling as any high-speed pursuits, it’s enjoyable simply as a character study. But there are more Easter eggs in Close Your Eyes than your average Marvel movie, if you know what to search for. The title itself refers to a line spoken by The Spirit of the Beehive‘s child protagonist, played by Ana Torrent — who also reunites with Erice here to portray Arenas’ adult daughter, also named Ana. Erice once tried to make a film called The Shanghai Spell, and a character within the film-within-the-film The Farewell Gaze speaks of “the Shanghai Gaze,” thus linking the two. And while El Sur was lucky enough not to be consigned to the same fate as Garay’s aborted opus, it’s not hard to equate the feelings surrounding a fictional unfinished work with Erice’s own about its real-life equivalent.
There’s sprinkles of film-nerd catnip in here as well, from an archivist friend (Mario Pardo) declaring that cinematic miracles have been AWOL “since Dreyer died” to the movie’s centerpiece, a late-night sing-along between Garay and his neighbors of “My Rifle, My Pony and Me” from Rio Bravo. (The fact that this rendition of the Dean Martin/Ricky Nelson tune, which Erice says was improvised on the spot, falls in virtually the same place between acts as Hawks’ film only makes the in-joke that much more amusing.) Had Erice ended the story here, with his lost-soul hero returning to his misfit community and finally reconciling with life’s unexpected detours, this still would have been an impressive late work from an artist who, having cherry-picked from his own journeys and obsessions, is done mourning what could have been.
But the film keeps going. A phone call after the TV show airs the episode leads to a break in this long-cold “unresolved” case. And it’s in this back half or so of Close Your Eyes that the real emotional pay-offs began to present themselves, the questions become answered, and Garay actually gets the chance to right one last wrong. For those who prefer melodramas that end with a grand yet sublime gesture, the final minutes of Erice’s ode to the power of memories will bring tears to your eyes. For those of us who love the movies as a medium for connection, the climax is something close to bliss. Any sense of bitterness over the hands of fate is gone. What you’re left with is the idea that you can still find peace, so long as you’re willing to look for it.
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