Close Your Eyes (2024)

4 Stars (out of 4)

The Sad King

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

A gift from the cinema gods, and a spot of refuge in this otherwise sparse movie year, Close Your Eyes is only the fourth feature-length film in the career of the 84-year-old Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice. Like his other films — The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), El Sur (1983), and The Quince Tree Sun (1992) — it's a film about observing, searching, and cinema itself. It's also about memory, and the ways it can subtly shift and change, including our memories of movies.

It begins as what appears to be a period piece. A lordly fellow in a toque, living on a lush estate, summons a man for a mission. He is to search for the man's teen daughter, supposedly in Shanghai. They talk and smoke. The sequence is elegant, mature, wistful, and poetic, and entirely fictional. It's a piece of an unfinished film, The Farewell Gaze, directed by Miguel "Mike" Garay (Manolo Solo), and starring Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado) as the man on the mission to China. After shooting one day, Julio walked away and was never seen again.

That was in 1990, and now, 22 years later, in 2012, an "Unsolved Mysteries"-type TV program contacts Mike about doing a show on Julio. He agrees, somewhat reluctantly, due to the promise of payment. After the abandoning of The Farewell Gaze, Mike has never directed again and scrapes by on translating gigs. He can use the money.

He begins doing some research in Madrid, speaking to Marta (Helena Miquel), a former girlfriend of both Mike and Julio, Julio's grown daughter Ana (Ana Torrent, who was the young star of The Spirit of the Beehive), and retired film editor Max (Mario Pardo), who watches over an archive of aging film reels. Their conversations wander down the halls of memory and mystery, shared pasts and unknown futures.

He returns home, which is a kind of shared, makeshift community of mobile homes and ramshackle homesteads. The neighbors have looked after his dog, and he repays them with home-grown tomatoes. The neighbors spend the evenings together, drinking and talking and singing songs. Mike and a younger neighbor make their way through a rendition of "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me," which was originally performed by Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson in Howard Hawks's masterpiece Rio Bravo. It's another allusion to cinema past. (There are also references to Josef von Sternberg and Carl Theodor Dreyer.)

In the final act, it appears that Julio may have been found, but this segment no better answers any questions than the rest of the film does. It continues to explore what it means to be human, and how much memory contributes to identity. It concludes with a bravura sequence, and the only possible way to end this, with a screening of the rest of the extant footage of The Farewell Gaze. It's a majestic moment, quiet and powerful.

In fact, all of Close Your Eyes is quiet and powerful, taking its time through its 2 hours and 49 minutes, but never feeling slow. It lingers, ponders, observes. Even the actors seem to have this built-in. Solo and Coronado both look like they've lived lives, accumulated sadnesses and regrets and bitter experiences, and yet there's still purpose. Maybe that's where the cinema comes in. It's the holder of hopes and dreams, maybe attainable, maybe out of reach, but hovering right in front of our eyes.