When, in early 2020, I wrote a piece about a rather marvellous installation by the great Spanish-Basque filmmaker Víctor Erice, I wasn’t, I confess, very optimistic that we’d ever see any more movies by him. Imagine my pleasure, then, when I learned a couple of years later that he was about to embark on the making of a new movie. This, after all, is probably our least prolific major director; since winning international acclaim for his feature debut The Spirit of the Beehive in 1973, he had made just two feature-length films – The South (1983) and The Quince Tree Sun (1992) – and a number of short (if for the most part no less impressive) works, including Lifeline (2002), La Morte Rouge (2006) and Broken Windows (2012). The meagre size of this body of work is deceptive, since there have been several other projects written by Erice which for one reason or another never got made; nevertheless, it also speaks of his unusually uncompromising approach to filmmaking. The absolute opposite of a director for hire, he sees no purpose in making a movie – a long, laborious, complicated and costly process, in most instances – unless it feels meaningful to him on a personal level. It’s why, I imagine, his work is consistently of such a very high standard; for me, at least, he is one of the finest cinematic artists of the last half-century.
Which brings us to that new film, Close Your Eyes, which premiered in Cannes in 2023, was released theatrically in the UK earlier this year, and is now available on BluRay and DVD (and through various streaming services). Though it has performed very well elsewhere, it didn’t screen very widely in the UK, perhaps because of its three-hour running time (that often makes exhibitors nervous), perhaps because many cinemas have failed to recover from the catastrophe of the Covid pandemic; many ‘arthouse’ movies are struggling to find audiences on the big screen. Now, one hopes, Close Your Eyes will reach the audience it deserves.
It’s a wonderfully rich, sophisticated work, but in no way difficult or inaccessible; though Erice has always steered clear of genre, as a lifelong cinephile he understands the appeal of strong, clear storytelling. Still, the film’s first scene – depicting a conversation between an elderly Sephardic Jew and an exiled Spanish Republican in a Parisian mansion in 1947 – might feel a little odd in its stylised dialogue and painterly lighting, until it suddenly grinds to a halt and a voiceover (by Erice himself) informs us that what we’ve been watching is a surviving scene from a film begun in the early 1990s, a film never completed because the actor playing the Republican suddenly vanished without trace; the circumstances of his disappearance were never discovered. At which point Close Your Eyes starts afresh, now in noticeably more naturalistic mode as it follows Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo, pictured below), the director of the unfinished film, around Madrid and then Andalusia in 2012. Garay’s career in film stalled when his friend the actor Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado, pictured at top) vanished; but now it seems the mystery of Arenas’s disappearance may finally be solved…
To reveal more of the storyline would spoil the viewer’s enjoyment of one of the most satisfying films to have been released in the last year. (It was in my top five for 2023.) Suffice to say that it’s no conventional mystery, but a subtle, intriguing and finally very moving meditation on themes that have recurred throughout Erice’s career: the effects of absence, loss and time’s passing; the way individual lives may be shaped by society and politics, by familial and other relationships, even by cinema; the relationship between memory, consciousness and identity. There’s also a new focus, very touching (and very Hawksian), on friendship. Stylistically, too, Close Your Eyes is characteristically Erice; delicate and quietly bold, it is visually precise and expressive, lyrical but never overwrought, and peppered with telling allusions to movies, literature and history. It feels not only like a continuation of his previous work but also, perhaps, a summation; indeed, its narrative draws quite extensively on materials from some of Erice’s unmade projects.*
And, like all of his work, it’s profoundly personal. It is, after all, about a Spanish-Basque director who never got to make as many films as he’d have liked; a man who (rather like Erice) left the north of Spain for Madrid and then the south; a man old enough to look back at his past. It also includes a substantial role for Ana Torrent, who first appeared so many years ago as the child in The Spirit of the Beehive; she once more gets to close her eyes and say, ‘Soy Ana…’ (‘It’s me… Ana’). And again it pays tribute to – and, gloriously, exemplifies – the potential and power of cinema as an art form. I do recommend it.
I’ll leave you with a few words from an interview I conducted with Erice towards the end of last year. ‘My life and work,’ he said, ‘have always been about watching films, analysing films, writing about them and making them… All the films I’ve made are simply a response to my intimate relationship with the cinema; they’re inextricably linked with my experience of life.’
Small wonder they are so deeply rewarding. A trailer for Close Your Eyes is here.
(* To find out more about this and other aspects of the film, you can read an essay I wrote for the May 2024 issue of Sight and Sound, or my booklet note for New Wave’s BluRay/DVD release of the film. Rest assured I receive no proceeds from sales of the disc or the magazine.)
notes and observations by Geoff Andrew 