'Close Your Eyes' Review: A Spanish Master Returns, With Power

Victor Erice's first feature film, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), begins in the 1940s, when a traveling movie theater arrives in a small rural town in Spain to screen Frankenstein. Among the crowd of spectators stands out a girl with an anxious look, Ana (Ana Torrent), whose sister will later assure her that in the movies no one dies and everything is a trick. However, what Ana sees on the screen will gradually filter into her reality, blurring the division between the fate of the misunderstood fantasy monster and the actions of those around her.

In “The South,” a project Erice never finished seeing but released anyway, another young woman finds in movies a crucial piece of information to decipher her father’s unspoken anguish. To open our eyes, Erice suggests, is to accept how little we understand about the pain of others, even those we love deeply. For Erice, a teacher, cinema functions as a revelatory force that can illuminate our most authentic feelings and longings, despite the efforts of some of his characters to escape their tortured pasts.

One gets the sense that Erice, who counts among his admirers such famous directors as Pedro Almádena and Guillermo del Toro, has been praising cinema ever since he began making his sporadic but delicately profound films.

Against all odds, Erice has returned three decades after his last work (a 1992 documentary titled “Dream of Light”), as if to say the last word on his own artistic legacy. The themes that have repeatedly consumed the 84-year-old filmmaker — the specter of the Spanish Civil War, estranged daughters with peculiar stories, the merciless march of time — coalesce in the slow-paced, poetically rewarding “Close Your Eyes,” his fourth film in 50 years and probably his last.

Played as the author’s confession through the character of stand-in filmmaker Miguel (Manolo Solo), “Close Your Eyes” takes on a contemplative, layered quality. Can we really learn about an artist through his work, or is creation just another mask? Miguel’s professional aspirations died when his best friend and renowned actor Julio Arias (a wonderful José Coronado in a sort of double role) disappeared without a trace while they were filming a period piece titled “La mirada de despedida,” a movie within the movie about a mysterious idealist tasked with finding a rich man’s lost daughter. Only two pivotal scenes of that unfinished adventure were ever finished, the opening and its poignant ending.

Miguel dives back into that chapter of his life when a TV show focused on unsolved cases attempts to unearth whether Julio, a womanizer with a fear of aging, died in an accident or by suicide, or whether a nervous breakdown allowed him to start over without a single memory of the man he once was. A partial answer appears midway through “Cierra los ojos,” but that’s just another door Erice prompts us to cross, which is by no means a clear resolution.

With a style of elegant lyricism, which consecrates small moments at miraculous and brilliant turning points, Erice lets the exchanges between the people he has conceived unfold without the need to advance the plot. His purpose, if there is an explicit one, is to enrich our minimal understanding of the lives that unfold in his truthful fictions; a substantial segment of “Cierra los ojos” is devoted to Miguel’s simple existence on the beach, fishing. We also learn about his own romantic regrets, his enduring friendship with a film editor fond of celluloid, and the unbearable loss of a son.

Obsessed with the power and symbolism of his actors, Erice seems to cast them based on their eyes, more specifically their incandescent expressiveness. That seems to be the case with Solo. You’ll also recognize the inquisitive gaze of the child protagonist of “Beehive” in Torrent, who now appears in “Close Your Eyes” as Julio’s daughter, a woman in her 50s. Torrent is older now than Erice was when they made their first film, and serves as a poignant reminder of both the years that have passed and how a person’s inherent essence is immutable through time. The cinema preserves the frozen memory of Torrent as a child, but reality has moved on.

The fact that Torrent has collaborated with Erice again after five decades (again playing a film lover in search of answers) makes for a wonderfully self-referential read. That’s the crux of “Close of Your Eyes” and Erice’s concise work: cinema crystallizes something that reality alone cannot, convincing us that perhaps what we need exists somewhere outside of us, somewhere we can only access through the screen. It’s both a reflection and an illusion.

Although cinema can trigger a memory-induced epiphany, it is not the remedy in itself, but rather an invitation to look within, to close one's eyes and find what is inalienable in oneself.

In the monumental final frame of “Close Your Eyes,” the most moving finale of the year, Erice’s camera closes its eyelids one last time, a humble sign of acceptance. Even within their limitations, the films see us.