Film review

Cerrar los ojos

Victor Erice (2023)

In the course of half a century, Victor Erice has directed four features – The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), El Sur (1983), The Quince Tree Sun (1992) and now Close Your Eyes.  The Spirit of the Beehive has long been widely considered among the greatest-ever Spanish films.  Its reputation and how few pictures Erice has made subsequently ensure that any new work from him will be regarded by cineastes as a major event.  This is especially true of Close Your Eyes:  even by Erice’s standards, a thirty-plus-year gap between films is long and Close Your Eyes is assumed to be the director’s swan song.  It’s optimistic to expect a fifth film, given Erice’s age now (nearly eight-four) and his rate of output to date.

Close Your Eyes, written by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, begins in 1947 in the grounds of a French countryside mansion.  The setting is loaded with symbolic implication- autumn leaves on the ground, a Janus-faced statue in the gardens.  The house is named ‘Triste le Roy’ because, as its owner explains to a visitor, the game of chess reflects the game of human life (or words to that effect) and he has always thought the king the ‘saddest’ piece on the board.  The elderly owner of ‘Triste le Roy’ is M Lévy and his visitor M Franch.  Lévy has summoned Franch to propose that he travel to Shanghai to find and bring back Lévy’s long-lost daughter, whom her terminally ill father longs to see once more before he dies.  Franch accepts the mission; Lévy gives him a photograph of the girl, whose name is Judith but whose looks suggest her mother was Chinese.  This opening scene, which lasts some fifteen minutes, is then revealed, through a voiceover, to be a film within Erice’s film.  The voiceover explains that during the making of ‘The Farewell Gaze’, Julio Arenas, the actor playing Franch, vanished without trace.  It’s now 2012; a television programme about Arenas’s mysterious disappearance is in development as part of a series of ‘Unsolved Cases’.

A main contributor to the programme is the protagonist of Close Your Eyes, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), who directed the film Arenas (José Coronado) was making when he disappeared.  Inevitably unfinished, ‘The Farewell Gaze’ was only Miguel’s second film and he has never made another, though he has become a well-regarded novelist and short-story writer.  Miguel explains to TV interviewer Marta Soriano (Helena Miquel) that he and Julio Arenas went back a long way.  They did their military (naval) service together.  It emerges, too, that both men were lovers of the same woman, Lola San Román (Soledad Villamil), whom Miguel visits when he learns that Lola, long resident in Buenos Aires, is back in Spain.  Taking part in the television documentary also prompts Miguel to look out memorabilia from his film-making days and to meet up with old friend Max Roca (Mario Pardo), a film editor and archivist, whose library includes ‘The Farewell Gaze’ footage.   Miguel’s meetings with Max and Lola, interspersed with one or two short flashbacks that describe (or imagine) the circumstances of Julio’s disappearance, occupy a good hour of screen time before Miguel returns to the coastal village where he now lives.  The TV programme about Julio goes out while he’s back there; Miguel starts watching on a television in the almost deserted local bar.  He doesn’t watch for long, though, and when Max phones to say that he has recorded the show, Miguel tells him he can wipe the recording.  Miguel reacts very differently to another phone call, soon after, from Marta Soriano.  She tells him that, after seeing ‘Unsolved Cases’, a woman has been in touch claiming that missing-presumed-dead Julio is alive and well.

Erice’s singular docudrama The Quince Tree Sun bored me when I caught up with it about twenty years ago.  The plot synopsis of Close Your Eyes suggested something livelier but that proves not to be the case – at least until Miguel travels to the retirement home where Belén Granados (María León), the woman who got in touch with the TV station, is a supervisor and ‘Gardel’, who may be Julio, works as an odd-jobs man.  It’s easy to understand why Erice, who hasn’t completed a film for so long, is determined to make the most of this opportunity but Close Your Eyes is excessively long (169 minutes) and its pace is not only slow but unvarying – including in the ‘Farewell Gaze’ introduction to the narrative proper.  (There’ll be those who think that makes the whole thing – the film and the mini-film it contains – more auteurial!)  Miguel’s reunion with Lola is a particular drag, imparting background information on their past relationship, and their relationships with Julio, through the characters telling each other things they already know (and which there’s little suggestion that they’ve forgotten).  It’s the same in scenes between Miguel and Max though at least Mario Pardo livens up the exposition.  The interlude in the seaside village Miguel now calls home introduces his friends there – Patón (Alejandro Caballero Ramis), the young couple Toni (Dani Téllez) and Teresa (Rocío Molina) – and Miguel’s memorably expressive dog.  These scenes make for pleasant viewing; what they contribute to the film as a whole is harder to fathom.  After he leaves for the retirement home, Miguel isn’t shown returning to the village.

It’s soon clear to him that the odd-jobs man really is Julio, and not just because he looks right:  Gardel’s few possessions include the photograph of Lévy’s daughter that Julio must have removed from the set of ‘The Farewell Gaze’, as well as the white king from Lévy’s chess set.  Gardel, so named by Sister Consuelo (Petra Martinez), one of the nuns who help run the retirement home, because he’s always singing tango tunes to himself[1], seems to have lost his memory completely.  (The doctor (Juan Margallo) who examined him when he first turned up in the locality, very much the worse for wear, tells Miguel he thinks Gardel may have sustained neurological damage as a result of acute sunstroke.)  When Miguel demonstrates the tying of knots that they learned during their military training, Gardel is able to follow suit; when Miguel shows him a photograph of the two of them in naval cadet uniform, though, Gardel denies that either he or Miguel are the young men in the picture.  Julio Arenas’s daughter, Ana (Ana Torrent), declined to take part in the ‘Unsolved Cases’ programme but Miguel contacts her once he’s convinced that Julio has been found.  Gardel/Julio doesn’t seem to recognise Ana when they meet.  More strikingly, his daughter doesn’t recognise him – or, rather, refuses to do so:  he disappeared from her life so long ago that, in an important way, this man is not her father.

According to Geoff Andrew (BFI ‘Programmer-at-large’), Close Your Eyes is a ‘richly satisfying meditation on memory, identity, family, friendship … and cinema’.  But the greatest of these is cinema – holding such a view is why, at any rate, I think this film will mean a lot to many who worship cinema and revere Victor Erice.  The movie love at work here goes well beyond the obvious (Miguel’s posters of Monsieur Verdoux and They Live by Night on the wall, a flip-book of the Lumière brothers’ arriving train among his mementos).  There are connections too with Erice’s career.  His last film before this one was made in the early 1990s – just when Julio Arenas disappeared from the film shoot and the world.  On the subject of farewell gazes, we can still discern in the features of Ana Torrent, now in her mid-fifties, the face of the little girl who played the heroine of The Spirit of the Beehive:  as Lévy longs to see Judith again before he dies, so Erice wants to see Torrent – and for audiences to see her – one more time in a film made by him.  In the climax to Close Your Eyes, Miguel arranges a private screening of ‘The Farewell Gaze’ at a cinema that has recently closed down but whose equipment is still in working order.  Max is there as projectionist; the audience comprises, as well as Miguel himself, Sister Consuelo, Marta Soriano, Belén Granados and, sitting side by side, Ana and her father.  ‘You think a movie can bring about a miracle?’ says Max to Miguel before the film starts, ‘Give me a break!  Miracles haven’t existed in movies since Dreyer died’.  Erice’s ending is far less explicitly miraculous than Dreyer’s in Ordet (1955) but Julio, as he watches himself on the screen, does look to be on the brink of recognising his former self.

It’s a relief that the film-within-the-film accounts for as little of the total screen time as it does:  ‘The Farewell Gaze’ has the same tempo as Close Your Eyes as a whole but is – and this does distinguish it from the larger film – laboriously melodramatic.  As might be expected, the sequences that Miguel managed to shoot before Julio disappeared include the crucial reunion scene between Lévy (José Maria Pou) and his daughter (Venecia Franco).  She wears Chinese costume under her coat and identifies not as Judith but as Qiao Shu, revelations that help to trigger her father’s apparently fatal collapse.  The upside of ‘The Farewell Gaze’ sections is that they give salience to José Coronado’s more naturalistic playing of Franch.  As a result, you look forward to seeing Coronado again at the retirement home:  he stands out there too in what, admittedly, is the film’s plum role.  The meticulous lead performance of Manolo Solo is fully aligned to Erice’s storytelling rhythms; as a result, it’s also a little dull.

In Erice’s closing shot, Julio Arenas closes his eyes.  Non-cineastes in the audience won’t find it hard either to obey the title’s imperative:  it was touch and go for this viewer for at least the first hour.  I wish Close Your Eyes were light-hearted a bit more often.  Lévy plays a mournful piano melody at the very start; Lola, at Miguel’s request, sings to him a love song, accompanying herself on the piano; Miguel and Julio duet a popular tango number.  All of these are meant to be emotionally poignant; none compares with the gentle pleasure of Miguel, with Toni, singing ‘My Pony, My Rifle and Me’ from Rio Bravo (1959) at the end of a relaxed evening on the beach.  This isn’t just the best musical moment of Close Your Eyes; it’s the most likeable movie-reference moment, too.  In the television studio, the theme music for ‘Unsolved Cases’ plays, and is followed by Miguel’s interview with Marta Soriano, so as to imply the show is going out live; it’s subsequently made clear that the interview has been recorded long before the programme airs.  It’s hard to believe, once Belén makes contact with them, that Marta and her TV colleagues would be sensitive enough to keep mum about the astounding consequence of their programme yet there’s nothing to suggest that the news of Julio’s discovery goes further than the key characters gathered at the retirement home.  There’s no point complaining that details like these don’t make realistic sense – you’ll be told they don’t matter in a work as poetic and transcendent as this.  I don’t really understand why they don’t, though.

12 April 2024

[1]  Carlos Gardel was ‘a French-born Argentine singer, songwriter, composer and actor, and the most prominent figure in the history of tango’ (Wikipedia).