Close your Eyes

To everyone's utter surprise, the Spanish director Victor Erice, now 84, emerged from oblivion in 2022 to direct Close your Eyes.  Erice is largely regarded as the greatest living Spanish film maker.  This is almost entirely on the basis of his 1973 film The Spirit of the Beehive, a remarkable picture that embodies the tragedy and paranoia of the Franco years in Spain.  Needless to say, Erice is an uncompromising film-maker, and has has produced only three other feature-length films and, then, at great intervals.  El Sur was released in 1982; it's a peculiar and lyrical film that I didn't understand when I saw it on a Criterion disk and possibly incomplete -- we have the first half of the narrative but the second part doesn't exist.  The Quince Tree Sun (1992) is a highly abstract, non-narrative picture that essentially documents how light interacts with a tree -- very few people have seen the movie although it is highly regarded.  Around 2000, Erice was recruited to make a movie about wartime spies called The Shanghai Smile.  Something went wrong and he was either fired (or resigned) from the project -- that movie was released under the direction of Fernando Trueba.  Extended allusions to the Shanghai Smile  (released in 2002) appear in Close Your Eyes, made by Erice 20 years later.  Close your Eyes caught everyone off-guard -- the movie has elements of a suspense film and is highly accessible; of course, it is very beautiful and contains some elliptical sequences and is very long, about 170 minutes.  But the picture is, in effect, a film noir that pays homage to Orson Welles, Jorge Luis Borges, and, even, Rio Bravo (1959) -- there's a very moving version of the Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson ballad "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me" at the center of the picture.  At its heart a meditation on aging and death, Close your Eyes is entertaining and a delight from beginning to end.  The film embodies Erice's lyrical, poetic approach to cinema but coupled with an effective and compelling plot with some resemblance to a thriller. 

A decaying manor house stands in a wet forest.  A herm sculpted to represent Janus but with one face youthful and the other elderly looks like a tallow candle half-melted in a moist arboreal bower.  In the house, a massive old man wearing a caftan sits as if enthroned in a large room.  A servant, a Chinese retainer in black sunglasses, opens the windows and morning light spills into the dim room -- this is the first effect characteristic of Erice's style which involves painting on the screen with amber or honeyed light.  A middle-aged man is granted an audience with the old king wearing the caftan.  The king is a sephardic Jew who says he has gone under many names but will die as Levy.  He charges his visitor with traveling to Shanghai to retrieve a daughter who has been lost in the chaos of the mid-twentieth century.  The king hands the private detective a sepia-toned picture of the girl; she is an archaic-looking porcelain princess holding a fan under her chin.  The camera lingers on faces.  The room is full of books, gloomy wall-hangings, and there is a chess set next to the enthroned Jew.  The name of the estate with its Janus herm and enigmatic Chinese servant is La Triste Roi ("the sad king").  We seem to have entered a story by Borges, pictured as if painted by the French artist Balthus (Pierre Klossowski) -- there's an atmosphere of scented decadence and cryptic mystery about the scene.  Then, suddenly, a title informs us that the next shot represents Madrid in 2012; a handsome man, about seventy, is waiting for a train.  The man, named Miguel Garay is the director of the film called The Farewell Gaze -- the scene in leprous-looking mansion in the wet woods was an episode in that movie, a picture shot in 1990, but never completed.  The Farewell Gaze was not finished because it's leading man, an actor named Julio Arenas mysteriously vanished before the picture was complete.  No one knows where Arenas went and there are surmises that he committed suicide -- his shoes were found among the rocks at the sea-side.  Miguel Garay who is retired and, seemingly, penniless has been invited to a TV studio where a series called Casas sin Resolver ("Unsolved Cases") is being made.  One episode in production considers the weird disappearance of Julio Arenas, mid-shoot, now thirty years before.  Garay gives an interview to the woman directing the TV show and, then, is encouraged to contact other people associated with Arenas' last project.  He visits an old friend named Max, the film's editor, and, then, sees Arenas' daughter who works as a tour-guide at the Prado.  There are rumors that Arenas drank himself to death or, a famous ladies' man, ran afoul of a powerful person and was murdered.  Miguel Garay, who now supports himself by fishing and writing short stories (he was formerly a novelist), finds a copy of one of his books at a stall on the street inscribed to a former lover, a beautiful woman from Argentina.  This woman is now an international movie star and maintains a house in Segovia.  Garay visits her and they discuss Arenas who was also her lover as well.  She sings a tango.  It seems that Arenas, famously handsome -- he looks a bit like Dean Stockwell -- feared old age and may have vanished to keep from aging in the public eye.  Garay, who doesn't have a car, goes back to a RV park on the seashore where he lives in a caravan with his dog.  (There's a lovely scene in which Garay and his  buddies from the RV park drink and play guitars as they sing; this is the sequence in which Garay sings the Dean Martin, and Ricky Nelson, song from Rio Bravo).  We see Garay on a little fishing vessel.  The show about Arenas' disappearance airs.   Garay goes to a cafe in the village with his dog but can't bear to watch the program.  A little later, he gets a call that someone who looks like Arenas has been located in a nursing home, also on the sea-coast.  Garay goes to the nursing home and discovers that Arenas is working there as a janitor and maintenance man, living in a little shack on the premises, and going under the name Garal -- he was found amnesiac and injured, possibly dying from sun-stroke several years earlier in a small town, and, after recovering to some extent, came to the nursing home where he works.  Garay is allowed to eat lunch with him by the nuns who run the nursing home and recognizes his old friend.  (They were in the navy together and served time in prison during the Franco regime.)  Garal has told people that he was a sailor, traveled to every country in the world that has a coast, and carries with him a picture of the little Chinese girl with the fan.  It appears that Garal, somehow, has enacted the plot of The Farewell Gaze in his delirium.  Garay moves into the nursing home to investigate and wins Garal (Arenas') trust by tying sailor's knots with him.  Garal seems to have no idea as to his own identity and doesn't seem to recognize Garay.  Garal/Arenas' daughter visits, called to the place from Madrid; her father doesn't seem to recognize her.  A psychiatrist consulting at the nursing home says that people are more than their memories and that, although Garal can't recall anything, his personality and sensibility remains intact.  Garay calls the old film editor, Max and has him come from Madrid with the outtakes from the unfinished film.  There is an old theater in the town, abandoned for many years, and Max uses an ancient projector (last used to show dailies from a spaghetti Western made in the nearby desert) to screen the final scene from The Farewell Gaze.  All the main characters in the movie are in the small, nondescript auditorium -- several nuns, including the one who is proud that she named the amnesiac man Garal (because he was always singing tangos -- the old nun was once a great dancer), the social worker who figured out that Garal was Arenas, Ana, Arenas' daughter, and, of course, Miguel Garay.  We see the final scene from the film in which Arenas, playing the detective, brings the little Chinese girl into the La Triste Roi and reunites her with her father.  (The servant looks on like an implacable deity).  The movie ends with close-ups of its principals bathed in the radiance pouring off the movie screen.  

Close your Eyes is melancholy, but not depressing.  It's very slow-paced, but this is integral to the film's design -- time passes relentlessly without respite; you are young and, then, old.  The characters are all appealing and sympathetic and the film itself is effortlessly elegant, with beautiful cinematography, short scenes comprised of eight or nine camera set-ups that fade to black. (In structure, the movie resembles Wim Wender's similarly tender Paris, Texas in which a man emerges from the desert with no memory as to where he has been.)  There are many penetrating details.  Garal is always barefoot (remember that he discarded his shoes when he went missing) and his love for tangoes suggests his affair with Garay's Argentinian girlfriend.  (The similarity between the names Garay and Garal suggest an affinity between the characters -- in both cases, they seem to have gone missing from their own lives.)  The theme of the movie, remembering the past and recapturing a lost identity, which may or may not be a blessing when recovered, is expressed lucidly -- we are our memories, but more than our memories as well.  And it is fiction in the form of the movies (Rio Bravo, Murnau's Faust that Max reveres, and the lost Farewell Gaze) that teaches us to live. Garal somehow has a meaningful life even though he has lost everything.  When we see Miguel Garay on the sea, fishing with his buddies, in a pale mist that threatens to dissolve everything, we understand that he has also lost himself.  I hope that Victor Erice on the strength of this quiet and great movie will make other features and live as long (and productively) as Manoel de Oliviera, who was making movies until he was 100, but if this is the director's last film, it is a beautiful one and closely aligned with the picture that made him famous, The Spirit of the Hive -- that movie also involves the showing of a film, in the case of the 1973 picture, Frankenstein, the sad, lonely monster who becomes the titular "spirit" of the hive to a little girl during the Spanish Civil War.  The fact that both movies involve films shown in remote villages in tiny movie theaters gives a strange, shapely form to Erice's works, matching the beginning of his career with what may be the end as well.