A Spanish Master Comes Full Circle

The beguiling prologue of “Close Your Eyes” (“Cerrar los ojos”) lures us into a shadowy post-Spanish Civil War estate. Here, a kingly figure (Josep Maria Pou) enlists the help of a private eye (José Coronado) to find his long-lost Chinese daughter (Venecia Franco). When the scene plays out, the intriguing footage is revealed to belong to an unfinished movie, “The Farewell Gaze,” airing on a Spanish TV program about unsolved cases. Its lead actor, Julio Arenas (Coronado), vanished without a trace mid-shoot 20 years prior, in 1992, and the tale’s resurgence has drawn the film’s reclusive director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) out of the woodwork and into the spotlight, where he now confronts looming questions about the disappearance of his collaborator and friend.

The plot of Victor Erice’s first dramatic feature in 40 years resembles a mile-a-minute mystery thriller, played out in the form of languid but absorbing conversations shot in close up over nearly three hours. Throughout, Spanish maestro Erice loops back on his sparse (but lengthy) career, creating a deeply moving work about cinema and memory, and cinema as memory. But it is, first and foremost, about regrets and disappointments. As Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri notes, the fictitious footage of “The Farewell Gaze” echoes Erice’s unrealized adaptation of “The Shanghai Spell,” the 1993 Juan Marsé novel he spent three years prepping to shoot later that decade, only to have the production fall out from under him. (The film would eventually be directed by Fernando Trueba in 2002).

“The Farewell Gaze,” like Erice’s “The Shanghai Spell,” remains a promise unfulfilled, a theme that underpins Garay’s subsequent search for answers about what might have happened to Arenas — and more importantly, why. Through reflections on the past and reunions with old friends and colleagues who might point him to new breadcrumbs, Garay’s search becomes an intensely personal reflection on his life, career and mortality. Arenas has been gone for decades, but he exists, in Garay’s mind and heart, as an ever-present specter immortalized on film, tormenting him with thoughts and imagined scenarios of the actor’s final days, which Erice presents in full.

In its final hour, “Close Your Eyes” becomes hauntingly focused on whether cinema can raise someone from the dead. In the third act, Garay finds a man with no memory (played by Coronoado) who he is certain is his long-lost friend, but whose faint recollections echo the fictitious details of Garay’s film. He regales this stranger with the unfinished final scenes of “The Farewell Gaze,” in the hopes that these images — of a fictitious life, but one whose dimensions feel utterly real — might jog his memory. The climax therein is quiet, poignant and overwhelming. (Erice’s control of slow-burn drama is practically unparalleled). But what makes it especially potent is its thematic coherence as a final act to Erice’s career.

“Movies about movies” may have become a default lingua franca in popular culture — Hollywood juggernauts like Marvel and Star Wars have become entirely self-referential — but Erice’s films have long been fixated on cinema’s place in personal and cultural consciousness. Apart from his solo 1992 documentary “El sol del membrillo”/”Dream of Light” and his 2016 experimental docu-collaboration “Víctor Erice: Abbas Kiarostami. Correspondencias,” Erice has only ever made three dramatic features, including this one. The others, “El espíritu de la colmena”/”The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973) and “El Sur”/”The South” (1983) are considered among the greatest Spanish films of the 20^th century, and the parallels between them (and between “Close Your Eyes”) are immediately overt.

The conclusion of his latest — set in an intimate, small-town movie theater — mirrors his first film’s introduction, in which a group of children in a post-Civil War village are treated to a screening of James Whale’s iconic “Frankenstein” from 1931. But the full-circle nature of Erice’s career isn’t limited to this setting. “The Spirit of the Beehive,” which explores the inner lives of two young sisters, 6-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent) and her older sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería), functions as a symbolic critique of Francoist Spain through its depiction of lingering fears and violent impulses. Ana, at one point, befriends an anti-fascist republican soldier on the run, who is eventually chased and gunned down by her townspeople, not unlike Frankenstein’s monster. The film’s depiction of this spiral becomes most surreal when Ana’s father (Fernando Fernán Gómez), a man potentially culpable in this killing, appears to her in the visage of the monster (makeup and all), a phantasmagorical image that crystalizes not only the movie’s impact on her, but on her understanding of the world.

As it happens, Ana Torrent — who delivers one of the 1970s’ most remarkable child performances — also features in “Close Your Eyes” as yet another character named Ana. This time, she’s the daughter of the missing (and possibly returned and amnesiac) Julio Arenas. She makes for a devastating foil to the obsessive Garay, as a middle-aged woman who has come to accept her father’s absence. While Ana has tried to live her life, Garay has withdrawn from his, all but disappearing like Arenas. Torrent’s role, in effect, plays like a tragic but moving form of closure when viewed in the broader context of Erice’s career, one filled with tales of young daughters chasing phantoms of their fathers, or who they imagine them to be.

Erice’s second film, the similarly post-Civil war “El Sur” (which Erice also wasn’t allowed to complete as he saw fit), follows 15-year-old Estrella (Icíar Bollaín), who comes to believe her father Agustín (Omero Antonutti) is writing letters to an old lover, the actress Irene Ríos (Aurore Clément), behind her mother’s back. Erice, though he presents these events through Estrella’s eyes, also goes to great lengths to portray the dissatisfaction and malaise that forces Agustín to reminisce on the past and, on occasion, get lost in fantasies at the movie theater, where he repeatedly returns to watch Ríos films. Like in “Beehive,” the moving image is transfixing and powerful to Erice’s characters, to the point that Ríos’ on-screen death compels Agustín to ask after her, even if it means unraveling his life in the process.

Despite the central place that movies occupy in Erice’s work, it’s difficult to reduce his films to simply “movies about movies.” Rather, cinema in Erice’s films is a gateway to self-understanding and self-actualization. This is perhaps why Garay believes so strongly, against all odds, that these images he so lovingly created with Arenas will give this stranger — robbed of his own history — a tangible sense of past and lived experienced on the silver screen, whether or not it works to bring back the man he lost.

Garay’s gradual, tragic acceptance of this irony — of a man whose only connection to his own identity may be rooted in fiction — is perhaps Erice’s acceptance too, of the numerous instances his cinematic projects were left forcibly incomplete. The un-real and imagined practically define his life’s trajectory. In both “Beehive” and “El Sur,” children picture and daydream entire scenes involving their respective fathers, and the men they imagine them to be. In “Close Your Eyes,” this meditation on the imagined must be enough of an answer for Garay, a man whose work once thrived on the gazes of others. Now, presented with a gaze that finds little to no recognition, it practically calls Garay’s entire existence as an artist into question. Like his friend, he may practically cease to exist without Arenas’ memories. The life and death Garay pictures for Arenas must grant the filmmaker closure, or else the looming mystery will shatter him.

The movie is about regrets and disappointments — and learning to live with them. In the process, it feels like Erice himself is coming to terms with his failure to breathe life into each one of his cinematic dreams across the decades. Just as ironic as Arenas’s predicament is that this pervading despondency helps make “Close Your Eyes” one of the most powerful films this year, propelling it into the upper echelons of modern arthouse cinema, with a small scale that never prevents it from feeling emotionally enormous.