Eye For Film >> Movies >> Close Your Eyes (2023) Film Review
Close Your Eyes
Reviewed by: Amber Wilkinson
![Close Your Eyes](/images/newsite/_Manolo_Pavón_600.jpg)
The latest film from Spanish auteur Víctor Erice - co-written with Michel Gaztambide - may have been more than three decades in waiting but it is brimful with ideas. While hingeing on a mystery mechanism that eventually proves satisfying in its own right, this is a meditation on both memory and movies as well as ageing and a hankering for the past that is informed by the melancholic knowledge that nostalgia is inevitably rose-tinted. Ideas of memory also inevitably evoke, as a background note, the Franco era and collective/selective forgetfulness, although this is a tale rooted in the personal rather than the political.
The “magic of the movies” is emphasised from the start as what we think will be the beginning of a tale of a man’s hunt for another elderly man’s daughter who is missing in Shanghai turns out to be a fragment of a film within this film. This is The Farewell Gaze, directed by Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), who, as we move to the leaden Spanish skies of 2012 is now sinking into a rumpled and baggy middle age. Garay’s film - which surely in a nod to Erice’s own struggles to get things made - was his second and last, never completed because the lead actor Julio Arenas (José Coronado) mysteriously vanished in the middle of the shoot.
![Copy picture](/images/stills/c/close_your_eyes_2023_1.jpg)
Arenas was more than just the star of his film, but also a friend who Garay had known since their time in the Navy together. So when a TV crew gets in touch with him for a show about “unresolved cases” he agrees to help them. This is the start of a tale that is as much about Garay’s past as Arenas'. These are histories that Erice brings home at their most tactile through a succession of rediscovered objects, including a postcard sent to a child, a series of photo booth snaps and king chess piece.
“A person is more than just a memory”, one character notes and Erice emphasises the slippery nature of recollections as we see that things which people may cling on to as a link to their past may be much less significant than they think. Although there is a narrative here, the Spirit Of The Beehive director is more concerned with feelings, the sensation of lost companionship, remembered romance or a memory evoked by a snatch of a song or the sound of celluloid running through a projector.
Erice is in no hurry, luxuriating in his ideas and allowing his strong cast, including Ana Torrent as Arenas’ daughter Ana and Soledad Villamil as a former lover of both Garay and Arenas bring emotional texture to them. If there’s a shaggy dog quality to some of this it lends it a natural, everyday feel that consolidates our connection to the ideas. When we return to a bit more magic from the movies, Erice makes you feel that while happy endings may only be the stuff of fairy tales, hopefulness brings its own rewards.
Reviewed on: 24 Apr 2024