Close Your Eyes

If there is one filmmaker that works at an even slower pace than Jonathan Glazer and Terrence Malick did, it’s Spanish auteur Victor Erice. He has only released four features now in the last 50 years, which include his beloved art-house masterpieces The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, and the more forgotton The Quince Tree Sun in 1992. Now Close Your Eyes, co-written by Erice and Michel Gaztambie, plays out like a swan song. The film is mysterious, at times a slog, but overall, a mysteriously enchanting meditation on memory and how it correlates to cinema in how we evaluate movies. There so many great movies that get treasured, only for so many of them to be forgotten about. Narratively, the film is another digressive film within narrative that echoes Fellini’s 8 1/2, Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night, Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris, Robert Altman’s The Player, and David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE to name a few. While not on the same level as those masterpieces, the film unfolds with many artful and hallucinatory moments. This is a highlight of the Cannes 2023 line-up, and the film is already making a mark for the international art-house aficionados.

The subtly sprawling and quietly epic film opens in a French village during the aftermath of WWII. We are introduced to a wealthy hermit who goes by the name of Sad King (Joseh Maria Pou). He ends up getting visited by an anti-fascist named José Coronado (Julio Arenas), who helped Sad King hide from the SS Army during the war (the Sad King is Jewish). The Sad King requests help to track down his half-Chinese daughter, whom he hasn’t seen in quite some time. The film fades out, and we cut to modern day, where we see Jose in film reels as a once-celebrated named Julio Arenas, who is involved in a project that was halted that left much of the footage to be lost. The film’s director, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), hasn’t worked on any projects in over 30 years.

It’s revealed that Jose has disappeared from the film scene. Miguel ends up embarking on a journey to track down Julio’s whereabouts. He gets assistance from the movie editor and film stock archivist Max (Mario Pardo) as well as his love Lola (Soledad Villai). Erice fades in and out from the fragments from the unfinished film to the events in the modern narrative. The films enigmatic narrative feels meta to Erice’s personal feelings about his journey as a filmmaker. While not completely autobiographical or even cynical, Erice is quite a gifted filmmaker who has only had a few opportunities. His film is a reflection of his own existentialism and its certainly personal journey. As the characters reflect what their work has amounted to over the years, you can see how it’s been a reflection for Erice as well.

Close Your Eyes is a sublime film, one that meanders and feels smothering in some areas only to feel enchanting in others. There is no denying just how passionate and personal the film is. In many ways, it’s certainly a film that feels like many missed opportunities from years of struggle, and it examines the obscenity of how art is treated like a vessel through time and space that is mostly abandoned and forgotten, but there is something magical once it’s rediscovered and appreciated.

CLOSE YOUR EYES is now playing in limited theaters.  It opens in Detroit at DIA’s DETROIT FILM THEATER on 9/20 For ticket and showtimes plese visit Close Your Eyes | Detroit Institute of Arts Museum (dia.org)