Review: Close Your Eyes

Image courtesy of Film Movement.

The Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice has made four films in about 50 years, so it’s good that with his latest, “Close Your Eyes,” his first in 31 years, he makes it count.

The first 20 minutes or so of the picture – which clocks in at just under three hours – casts a spell as we watch an old man, at some point after World War II and the Spanish Civil War, has called another man to his estate for a mission. The visitor (Jose Coronado) is asked to find a young woman, who is half-Spanish, half-Chinese, who has gone missing.

The spell is broken when we learn that this interlude was a prolonged scene from an unfinished movie titled “The Farewell Gaze” that was shot in 1990 and never completed when Julio Arenas (Coronado, who portrayed the visiting man to the estate in the opening scenes) walked off the set and was never seen again.

This disappearance has haunted the film’s director, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), ever since – not only because it derailed his career, but also because Arenas was his close friend; they’d served in the military together and even shared a girlfriend at one point.

Miguel is interviewed by a TV show that focuses on solving mysteries about Arenas’ disappearance and while he seems reluctant to take part in it, the fact that he has never been able to move past it makes him curious enough to get involved.

He meets up with the now-adult daughter of Arenas (played by Ana Torrent, the start of Erice’s 1973 classic and greatest film to date, “The Spirit of the Beehive”), who clearly has affection for Miguel but is not interested in being interviewed for the show.

Then, a break in the Arenas case sets into motion a new series of events in its final third. I won’t give away what happens, but suffice it to say that the last section of the movie involves Miguel and some of his friends trying to – for lack of a better phrase – save a life through cinema.

Much of the film’s action moves at a pace that some might find glacial and it takes patience to get where it’s ultimately going. But those who are accustomed to so-called slow cinema will be rewarded. Erice’s debut, “Beehive,” is one of film’s greatest and is among the undisputed classics of 1970s European cinema. His next two films – “El Sur” and “The Quince Tree Sun” (unseen by me) – were well liked but not as rapturously received.

Therefore, “Close Your Eyes” is Erice’s finest work since his debut. It’s a moving testament to plundering the past to heal wounds – which, in this case, is carried out through the medium in which Erice has plied his trade. This is a mysterious, haunting, and powerful film.