When it’s been over 30 years since your last feature length film, and 40 years since your last fiction one, what do – or what can – you make a movie about to end that hiatus? Legendary Spanish director Victor Erice answers that question with perhaps the only real feasible solution; you make a movie about yourself, and about the movies themselves. Close Your Eyes is a work of real self-reflection from Erice about himself as a man and as an artist, examining his career in a meta but still very earnest way in a glacially slow but occasionally utterly beguiling story of memory and absent friends.
Stepping into the role of quasi-Erice is veteran actor Manolo Solo, playing ageing film director Miguel Garay. Miguel hasn’t set foot behind a camera for 20 years, not since his last film – a late-‘40s-set adventure-mystery called The Farewell Gaze – halted production early on after the lead actor Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado) suddenly went missing, never to be found. From the off, the parallels with Erice himself are obvious, from the decades-long directorial absence to the premature shutting down of a production, mirroring Erice’s own El Sur from 1983, which infamously had the financial plug pulled by its producer with half the script un-filmed.
When an ‘unsolved mysteries’ TV program decides to do an episode on Julio’s disappearance (and presumed death), Miguel agrees to provide them with an interview and some of the film’s material, prompting him to re-examine his last days with Julio as well as to reconnect with the people in his life at the time. Fundamentally, Close Your Eyes is a series of long, unhurried conversations between gracefully ageing artists, discussing successes and regrets and the general State Of Things as Miguel gets back in touch with his old editor, an old flame, and, most importantly, Julio’s daughter Ana (Ana Torrent).
Torrent also played a character called Ana for Erice 50 years ago in The Spirit of the Beehive, her first film as a child actress and his first directorial effort, and this meta charge is central to Erice and co-writer Michel Gaztambide’s thesis about the power of movies to collapse and erase time, a movingly earnest ode to cinema’s unique artistic potential. One transcendently lovely sequence in which Miguel shares a drink and a singalong with his younger neighbours aside, though, it’d be hard to say that this incredibly talky approach is particularly *gripping*. Elegant, gentle, and relaxing? Yes. But consistently compelling? Not really.
You do feel the three hour runtime sitting heavy on you, and though Erice’s formal confidence has clearly not left him in his long time away, the endlessly grey colour palette doesn’t help with that (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Spain look less appealing as a holiday destination in any film than here). After decades of near-silence, Erice’s return certainly feels like a piece of film history, but that’s more of an after-the-fact intellectual thrill, with Close Your Eyes mostly content to sit still with its ponderings, a film of admirable calmness with surprisingly little to prove.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 