The Long Goodbye
By David Schwartz
Close Your Eyes
Dir. VĂctor Erice, Spain/Argentina, Film Movement
VĂctor Erice’s first feature in 30 years, Close Your Eyes is a deeply personal capstone by the 84-year-old artist. Like his quietly enigmatic films, Erice’s career is filled with lacunae. A decade passed between each of his three previous features: The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), El Sur (1983), and The Quince Tree Sun (1992). Given these gaps, it is fitting that the two main characters in Close Your Eyes are a director, Miguel Garay, and an actor, Julio Arenas, who walk away from filmmaking after the actor inexplicably vanishes during the making of a movie. The film within the film is called The Farewell Gaze, a title which would work, but probably be too on-the-nose, for Close Your Eyes.
We will learn that Miguel has left Madrid for a quiet, somewhat reclusive existence in a seaside Andalusian village, where he subsists on freelance translation gigs, fishing, gardening, and writing short fiction. Miguel starts writing a story about an artist “who decides one day that his masterpiece would not be a movie, but his life.” Miguel would like to forget about his past, not worry about his future, and simply live in the present, a desire captured in a relaxed nighttime moment drinking wine with friends, when he picks up a guitar and sings a song about the pleasures of friendship. The scene may celebrate the pleasures of daily life, but the song, of course, is a movie citation: “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me,” from Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo.This is one of many film references; Erice pays homage to the Lumière Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, Nicholas Ray, and Carl Dreyer.
Close Your Eyes is primarily a movie about growing old and the power of memory, with cinema as its central metaphor. The underlying tension throughout all of Erice’s work is that which lies between the still and the moving image, between the desire to freeze time and the inevitability of its passage. In a beautiful gesture, the Lumières' Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) is shown to us first in still form as in a flipbook, before it is animated, bringing the waiting passengers to ghostly life. The death of celluloid, with its textured grain and the sensual physicality of its metal reels and large projectors, which has been replaced by the bland immateriality of digital cinema, is among Close Your Eyes’ key preoccupations. Two sequences from the uncompleted The Farewell Gaze frame the movie. Filmed on 16mm, looking very much like a slowly paced art-house movie from the last century, The Farewell Gaze is about an aging Jewish aristocratic, in exile after World War II, who hires a man to travel to Shanghai to find his daughter Judith, who now lives as Qiao Shu. (Many characters in the film go by two different names, signaling Erice’s interest in the elusive nature of identity.) The fragments we see of The Farewell Gaze look like a film that could have been made by Erice early in his career, and in fact one of Erice’s aborted projects was a movie called The Promise of Shanghai.
After this dreamlike opening we fade in on what is clearly a video image of the Ciudad del Cine train station in Madrid. A mecca of the modern moving image, with a film academy, archives, and multiplex, the Ciudad del Cine is also the home of numerous TV studios. Miguel is going to the office of the TV series Unsolved Cases, which is preparing a tabloid-style news piece about the disappearance of Arenas.This sequence marks a shift in style that at first feels uncharacteristic for Erice, whose spare, exquisite body of work until now has consisted entirely of painterly, meditative images. We are now in a narrative about the search for a missing person that looks a bit like a TV movie, with shot-reverse shot structure. His previous movies felt impressionistic, filled with evocative images that floated free from the constraints of narrative.
The tepid rollout of Close Your Eyes at Cannes last year, relegated to the Premiere section rather than the official competition—where it clearly belonged—may be due to a perception that Erice’s comeback film may have been something less than a true return to form. But this is to underestimate what Erice is doing in this deceptively straightforward film. While it’s more story-driven than we might expect, Erice pauses along the way, not just to land on images of simple beauty but also to linger on the rueful interactions between friends, family members, and former lovers. The characters of Erice’s films are mesmerized by flickering images on a movie screen, obsessed with memories of past loves—real or imagined, and oppressed by the forces of history. And ultimately, they are haunted by the passage of time.
Through sheer coincidence, Miguel tracks down a woman named Lola, a former flame who also dated Julio. In a long wistful conversation, a scene that lasts nearly 15 minutes, they muse about the paths their lives have taken and Miguel’s decision to live in solitude. There are also poignant scenes between Miguel and Ana, Julio’s daughter, who has no idea whether her father is still alive. Miguel and Ana have their first meeting at the cafe in the Prado Museum, where she works as a docent. (In yet another aborted project, Erice had planned to make a documentary about Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, housed at the Prado.) The middle-aged Ana is played by Ana Torrent, the little girl from The Spirit of the Beehive who is obsessed with the monster in James Whale’s Frankenstein.To gaze at Torrent’s wide eyes and expressive face a half-century after her mesmerizing performance as a child in that earlier film has the startling impact of a jump cut. Yet as rich with subtext as the scenes with Torrent are, the film attains its true mystery and transcendence in the encounters that end the film, between Miguel and his oldest friend, whose mind holds only the vaguest memories of the past.
As it turns out, the shot-reverse shot structure, in Erice’s hands, is much more than a conventional device. Each gaze between people, each cut from one close-up to another, is imbued with mystery, a sense that two people can never fully know each other. In Close Your Eyes, the human face is the most mysterious landscape. And both the film-within-the-film (The Farewell Gaze) and the film itself beautifully turn on the power of the reverse shot. In the former, the reason the aristocrat needs his daughter to return from Shanghai is because she alone can see him for who he really is; only her reverse shot can free him and allow him to die in peace. And Julio can only find his own identity in a reverse shot that occurs in a magical scene in an old cinema, when he sees his younger self on-screen. “Miracles in movies haven’t existed since Carl Dreyer,” says one character near the end of Close Your Eyes. With this exquisite reverse shot, Erice refutes that claim.