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| Director Victor Erice |
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| Erice on the set |
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| Erice with José Coronado and Manolo Solo |
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| Erice with Ana Torrent |
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| Idea Vilariño |
CLOSE YOUR EYES (Cerrar los ojos) A Spain Argentina (169 mi) 2023
Today that time has long passed, Today that life has passed like a dream, Today I laugh when I think of it, Today I've forgotten those days, I don't know why I wake up on some nights empty of sleep hearing a voice that sings and that, perhaps, is mine.
I would like to die – now – of love, so that you would know how much I loved you, I would like to die, now, of love so that you would know how much I loved you.
Some nights of peace, – if there are still any – passing as if without me through those empty streets, amidst the lurking shadow and a sad smell of wisteria, I hear a voice that sings and that, perhaps, is mine.
I would like to die –
now – of
love,
so that you would
know
how much I loved
you,
I would like to die, now, of
love
so that you would
know
how much I loved you.
—Idea Vilariño, La Canción y el Poema (The Song and the Poem),1972, Idea Vilariño - El poema y la canción (English translation)
Having made a film in each decade of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, Víctor Erice is a Spanish-Basque filmmaker who has not been seen on the cinema landscape in the last 30 years, though he’s made a few short films and a museum installation collaboration with fellow director Abbas Kiarostami entitled VICTOR ERICE – ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: CORRESPONDENCE (2007), directing only four features in 50 years, resurfacing here with a masterfully eye-opening and deeply personal film that’s just not like anything else you could possibly see at the moment, which makes it uniquely fascinating. Best known for making The Spirit of the Beehive (El Espíritù de la Colmena) (1973), a scathing rebuke of the Franco era, made during the waning years of his fascist rule, yet told in an allegorical style from a child’s point of view. Premiering at Cannes, where it received a seven-minute ovation, there was some controversy over this new film as it was screened in a sidebar outside of competition, which is a question in itself, meaning fewer screenings, with Erice refusing to attend the festival, complaining he was never informed about the decision and felt disrespected, but it ended up listed as the #2 best film of the year by Cahiers du Cinéma: Top Ten Films of 2023. At nearly three hours, this ruminative essay definitely requires patience, yet it’s clear that it’s made by a consummate artist, with little action to speak of, as this is largely a memory play that operates on several different levels, moving back and forth in time, becoming a haunting meditation on memory, while also a manifesto of love for cinema and the power of art to transform. At 84, Erice is one of the oldest directors working today, never in a hurry, working at a decidedly different pace, adding the uncommon grace of elderly wisdom, having the capacity to look back on his life while at the same time being present, creating a rich and sophisticated work that has the ability to enthrall, though what immediately stands out is the age of the characters onscreen, with most of the lead protagonists well over the age of 60, as that’s just not something we’re used to, so it takes a while to adjust to the slower rhythm and pace of the film, where time itself is etched into the storyline. Told in different time periods, using very long-structured conversations and the technique of a film-within-a-film, where Valentín Álvarez’s cinematography switches to 16mm film, also shooting in a time of twilights, the bordering moments between darkness and light, representing states of semiconsciousness of the characters, with an evocative musical score by Federico Jusid, using the Spanish locations of Castell de Ferro, Granada, Aguadulce, Almería, Andalusia, Asturias, and Madrid, yet it opens with an introductory prelude sequence (with an interconnected epilogue) at an immense château just outside of Paris in 1947 before jumping ahead to contemporary Madrid in 2012. What happens in between remains a mystery, as Erice relocates us to 1990 when a director makes a film that tries to recreate the earlier events, but the project is scrapped when the lead actor disappears and hasn’t been seen since, with the majority of the film wrapping itself around that open question, literally haunting those that knew him, yet the film is as much about a director who hasn’t made a film in 30 years, mirroring the story of Erice, becoming an existential examination not only of his life, but all the people who remind us of who we once were, and remain connected in some way, as that missing piece continues to touch their own lives. Given a classical structure, the film begins and ends with a garden sculpture on top of a pillar that represents the god Janus, with his two opposite faces, one that looks to the past and one that looks to the future, two faces of the same identity, one vigorous and energetic, and one bearded and aged, which may as well be the director looking at his life from all directions.
Erice was going to write and direct THE SHANGHAI HAUNTING (2002), based on a novel written by Juan Marsé, working several years on the script, but due to creative differences with producer Andrés Vicente Gómez, Erice chose to leave the project and was replaced by Fernando Trueba. While he left before shooting began, it does appear that some footage may have mysteriously made its way into this film, but that’s simply the aura of cinema. Written by the director and Basque-French screenwriter Michel Gaztambide, the film has a novelesque sweep about it, but it’s an original screenplay that mirrors a director looking back upon his own career, creating a seminal work that gets under the skin in such an atypical fashion, as it’s really an exploration of an artist exploring his own memories, many of which get lost, like a form of amnesia, which is how Spain tends to remember the horrors suffered under the repressive Franco regime, offering a profoundly poetic and semi-autobiographical tone. On the surface, the film feels completely apolitical, perhaps more like a detective story uncovering hidden mysteries, but the exposed layers buried underneath build toward a revelatory and heartrendering climax. In a riveting prelude sequence narrated by the voice of Erice, we are introduced to a wealthy, yet aging Spanish aristocrat living in France as a refugee from Spain’s Franco, Monsieur Lévy (Josep Maria Pou), who lives alone on immense grounds he has named “Triste-le-Roy,” or The Sad King, an homage to his favorite chess piece that he identifies with (also the name of a countryside villa in a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, Death and the Compass - UNM Digital Repository), along with his loyal Chinese servant Lin Yu (Kao Chenmin), having discharged all the rest of the staff as he simply grew tired of them being completely disingenuous sycophants. He enlists the aid of a man he does not know, Julio Arenas as Monsieur Franch (José Coronado), an anarchist militant from the Spanish Civil War who was jailed during the Franco era for helping persecuted Jews cross the border through the Pyrenees, labeled Communists by the Nationalists and part of a Judeo-Bolshevik threat to be eliminated, making an impression on Lévy as a trusted man of principles. With little more than a haunting photograph to go on, he asks him to fulfill the last request of a dying man with only a few months to live, sending him to Shanghai to look for his daughter Judith who was taken from him by her mother and given the name Qiao Shu (Venecia Franco). His sole interest is to look upon her uncontaminated gaze one last time before he can rest in peace, as she’s the only person who truly sees him as he is, unfiltered by any outside distractions. As he sets out on the adventure, the frame freezes, with Erice transporting us to Madrid in 2012, with former novelist and aging director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), an alter-ego of the director, recounting his memories of working on his unfinished film The Farewell Gaze in 1990, which is the footage we see in the opening prelude sequences, working with his close friend and lead actor Julio Arenas who disappeared without a trace in the middle of shooting, leaving behind an inexplicable mystery. The weight of time is a burden that Garay carries on his back, worn down and weatherbeaten, yet as fate would have it, he is invited to a sensationalist, tabloid-style television show entitled Unresolved Cases that investigates unsolved mysteries, but never delves under the surface, instead thriving on conspiracy theories, speculation, and unverified sightings, where Arenas becomes the focal point of one of their segments, meeting one of the producers, Marta Soriano (Helena Miquel) for an interview, with the show also providing what little background detail is known, CLOSE YOUR EYES clip | BFI London Film Festival 2023 YouTube (1:00). Garay doesn’t really shed any new light on camera, openly acknowledging “I lost my best friend, and I lost my movie,” but the incident does stimulate renewed interest, reconnecting him with the film’s crew, a former lover, and Julio’s daughter, who are like ghosts of the past.
Coming at a time when cinema has lost some of its popularity and social impact, where an entire generation has lost what it feels like to experience the texture and color saturation of 35mm film, a dying artform in stark contrast to the flat digital look of today that is simply easier to reproduce, or the sublime magic of Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos, or Kiarostami, who are retained in our memories, reintroducing the debate between art and life, with no one else in the world making anything like this, yet this austere, resourceful film leaves a lasting legacy with its quietness and reflective pauses, adding a contemplative nature to each scene, with rambling conversations that at times resemble Hong Sang-soo sequences, with performances that are achingly authentic and human, where viewers can reflect on what they’re witnessing and draw their own conclusions. At the Prado Museum (Museo del Prado), Miguel meets in the café with Julio’s daughter Ana (Ana Torrent, the 6-year old little girl in THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE), as she works there providing guided tours of the artworks, Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos) new clip official (English ... YouTube (2:37). While Ana hasn’t heard anything from her father, many accounts believe he is dead, having found his shoes on a cliff overlooking the sea, where the presumption is he jumped to his death, but his body was never found and Miguel doesn’t really believe that, yet it’s becoming more apparent that they may never uncover what really happened, leaving them to ponder, “His movies will always be there… But what about him, as the person he was?” Her face captured in extreme close-up, the disconnect Ana feels from her father is an extension of her role in the earlier film, where her fear and fascination with seeing the Frankenstein monster onscreen mirrors her relationship with her distant father, where just like in Mary Shelley’s novel, she feels rejected by her father, as even now after all these years, that faded memory, like Frankenstein, needs to be brought back to life, where there is a beautiful intertextuality between the two films. Ana’s job plunges her into a connection with Spanish heritage, literally communing with the rich history of Spain’s greatest artists, yet the daily routine has a numbing effect, where time has a way of distancing her from the subject matter, much like the memory of her father, yet her very presence connects us with the first Erice film, placing the director himself with his passion for filmmaking inside this reverential and monumental search back through time. Miguel never directed another film, retreating instead to a quiet life along the seaside coast of a small fishing village where he lives alone with his dog writing short stories or translating various works, where at one point we see Miguel urged to strum a guitar and sing a cowboy song, joined by his friendly neighbors on the beach in a simply enchanting rendition of a Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson song from Howard Hawks’ classic western Rio Bravo (1959), "My Rifle, My Pony & Me" - Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes ... YouTube (2:30), which completely captures the utter relaxation of the original, Rio Bravo (1959) - "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me" (4K HDR ... YouTube (2:09), easily the film’s happiest moment which suggests simpler times. At the Cannes screening, the audience broke out into spontaneous applause at the end of the scene, yet this feels like a nod to an old-fashioned filmmaking that just isn’t being made anymore.
Miguel also meets with Max (Mario Pardo), a grizzled old film editor and projectionist who is storing the finished reels of the film in a vault, becoming something of an archivist, describing his occupation as “cinema archeology,” suggesting 90 percent of cinema history still exists only on film stock, even though theaters rarely screen anything on 16mm or 35mm anymore, now just sitting on the shelves collecting dust, as if it never existed, causing Max to suggest that the best way to grow old is “with no fear and no hope,” both of them commiserating on life without Julio, but Max is under no illusions that he’ll suddenly turn up alive, declaring “Miracles haven’t existed in the movies since Dreyer died,” a reference to that miraculously exquisite finale of ORDET (1955). With a sign in the background reading “Rosebud,” perhaps it comes as no surprise that Max has replaced his cherished movie poster of Murnau’s FAUST (1926) with Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night (1948 – of interest, the director published a book on Ray in 1986), replacing a miraculous fantasy ending where Faust sells his soul in exchange for eternal youth with a love story more tragically downbeat and hopeless. Miguel also meets with Lola (Soledad Villamil), an Argentine tango singer and former girlfriend of both he and Julio, yet remains fiercely independent, though because of their former intimacy the discussion about Julio turns more deeply profound and serious, producing images with deeper implications, even confessing that he always thought that Julio’s disappearance was voluntary, suggesting it may be a form of liberation, escaping from a superfluous life, severing himself from his troubled past, Víctor Erice's Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos) | First Clip YouTube (3:39). Before he leaves, he asks her to sing his favorite song on the piano, Alfredo Zitarrosa’s La Canción y el Poema (The Song and the Poem), adapting a poem by Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño, evoking a great sense of melancholy with the striking verse “I would like to die now of love,” EL POEMA Y LA CANCION de Idea Vilariño y Alfredo Zitarrosa YouTube (3:28), arguably the heart and soul of the film, infusing this magnum opus with a sorrowful spirit of love. The last ghost of the past is the memory of his son who died unexpectedly in a tragic accident before he could enter art school, which still weighs heavily upon him, storing his memories in a trunk that contains personal objects like photos, postcards, and toys, also a flipbook composed of the frames from that early Lumiėres sequence, [Actual 4K Scan] The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station ... YouTube (46 seconds), objects loaded with emotion that remind us when you see an object of a loved one, you do not see the object, you see the person. This is particularly memorable when Lévy uses a piano melody to invoke the spirit of Judith, as she initially denied her identity, but the floodgates soon opened. The path takes an unusual turn, one that could never be anticipated, yet the way Erice handles it is beyond reproach, becoming a meditation on aging, where the passage of time is inescapable, traversing delicate territory with an enlightened hand, crafting something that is as mesmerizing as it is unique. The inspirational joy of the finale may recall the unbridled innocence at the end of Giuseppe Tornatore’s CINEMA PARADISO (1988), or even the mesmerizing power of Maria Falconetti close-ups in Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928), providing a moment of indescribable beauty that reflects what few works have achieved. Ultimately this is a story of reunions and memories, of broken dreams and scars, while it’s also a dialogue with the life and work of its author, where we learn that “Consciousness is as important as memory,” becoming a tribute to cinema and its ability to serve as a collective and personal memory, exploring what remains of our identity, literally transcending the material with a dive into the deepest regions of our hidden subconscious, which Erice equates to the entire history of cinema, with movies and mortality inextricably linked, and in doing so reveals the essence of our own fragile humanity.
