Close Your Eyes

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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“Close Your Eyes” – Spanish Filmmaker Victor Erice’s first feature-length film in more than 30 years – has been called “a moving meditation on memory, identity, and cinema itself.” An homage to the power of movies, it might be viewed as the octogenarian’s swan song.

Cineastes will recognize Erice as the celebrated director of “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), “El Sur” (1983), and “Dream of Light” (1992).

“Close Your Eyes” (original title “Cerrar los ojos”) opens with a scene in a grandiose French country estate, where an aging refugee from Franco’s Spain summons a man to track down his long-lost daughter.

“The atmosphere is one of richly faded glory, painted in shades of brandy-ish velvet – yet just as we’re getting involved in this plight, building toward a bittersweet reveal, we lurch forward in time to 2012, and the tactile brocade texture of Valentín Álvarez’s 16mm camerawork gives way to a grayer digital smoothness.”

Turns out, what we’ve been watching is an unfinished film called “The Farewell Gaze,” a work abandoned by its director Miguel Garay (played by Manolo Soto as a stand-in for Erice). The film was never finished when the alcoholic lead actor Julio Arenas (José Coronado) suddenly disappeared. His body was never found.

Now, twenty years later, Miguel Garay is lured out of retirement by a lucrative offer to appear as a talking head on a sensationalistic true crime TV show about Julio’s disappearance. Arriving in Madrid, Miguel gets sucked into the intrigue and decides to play detective himself. He begins by digging into old archives in a storage unit; talking to Julio’s daughter (Ana Torrent); visiting with the movie’s editor (Mario Pardo), whose stuffy apartment is filled with 35mm canisters; and calling on a former flame (Helena Miquel), a singer who was involved with both Miguel and Julio.

Miguel is a man past his prime, filled with nostalgia and regret. As he digs deeper, he begins to ruminate on why his own career as a director went astray. “We are nobodies,” he says, while his buddy Max explains that the best way to grow old is to do so “without fear, nor hope.”

The final scene, appropriately set in an old movie theatre, brings us back to the opening, with all the pieces falling into place. By watching reels from the unfinished film, the secret of Julio’s disappearance is (partly) revealed.

Nearly three hours in length, “Close Your Eyes” require patient viewing. It’s overly talkative, and somewhat rambling, but “everything in it has a purpose and its power builds gradually over the film’s extended running time.

If you hurry, you can still catch “Close Your Eyes” today at Tropic Cinema.

Victor Erice has used movies within movies as a storytelling device before, but here that device becomes his film’s raison d’être. The story ultimately explores how things that were “long-abandoned or seemingly dead – whether Julio, Miguel’s movie or the cinema itself – may not be after all.”

The classic “Cinema Paradiso” may remind us of our love of movies. But this one is “a love letter to filmmaking and the power of film to affect us and stay in our memory, and how it can change our lives.”

Victor Erice calls “Close Your Eyes” a very personal experience. Perhaps he’s trying to explain his own disappearance from filmmaking for 31 years.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com