Master Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice returns after three-decade absence with singular drama Close Your Eyes

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Close Your Eyes

Directed by Víctor Erice

Written by Víctor Erice and Michel Gaztambide

Starring José Coronado, Josep Maria Pou and Manolo Solo

Classification N/A; 169 minutes

Opens at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto Aug. 20

Critic’s Pick

Close Your Eyes marks the first feature film from 84-year-old Spanish auteur Víctor Erice in 31 years, following the director’s twin narratives of childhood disillusionment, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and El Sur (1983), and the documentary of painter Antonio López García, The Quince Tree Sun (1992). Erice’s pictures are tender portrayals of artistry in and after Francoist Spain, sifting postwar anxieties through the imagination of children. Although not a complete hiatus – Erice has since directed short films and contributed to anthologies – the three-decade wait for the master’s fourth film was chasmic after his vital contributions to the medium.

Close Your Eyes begins in 1947 at a fictitious French estate named “Triste Le Roy,” where private eye Franch (Jose Coronado) has been invited by the terminally ill and affluent Levy (Josep Maria Pou). The camera hovers on a statue of Janus in the yard – one side clean-shaven and youthful and the other stern and tousled with a thick beard – before Levy explains the mission at hand: Franch is to track down his long lost daughter in Shanghai, so that Levy can see her before he dies. As Franch exits the mansion gates, we discover via voiceover that this scene is actually an excerpt of The Farewell Gaze, a fictional film wherein Franch was the final role played by actor Julio Arenas before his mystifying disappearance in 1990.

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The film lurches forward 22 years to Madrid, where The Farewell Gaze director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) is invited onto a TV program to discuss Julio’s disappearance, as he was “one of the most loved and admired [actors] in Spanish cinema.” The production ceased in 1990 and the film was never completed, but Miguel kept a handful of furbished scenes on film reels preserved by his archivist friend Max (Mario Pardo). The term Max uses for his line of work is “industrial archaeology,” a slight by Erice against the shrinking public interest in photochemical film stock.

Miguel and Julio first met in the Spanish navy and pursued their artistry after the collapse of Franco’s reign. Although no body was found, authorities concluded that Julio died in a drunken seaside accident. Unconvinced of his friend’s passing, Miguel begins to examine his own archives, which lead him on a trek along the coast to an asylum with traces of Julio’s past.

The idea of the vanishing artist, preserved by the moving image and cultural memory, makes for a slyly self-referential plot: Erice is both the missing person and the investigative director inching toward a discovery, stomaching the losses of both men. “I lost my best friend but I also lost my movie. Game over,” Miguel tells Julio’s daughter Ana (Ana Torrent, who played the precocious six-year-old protagonist in The Spirit of the Beehive), as he explains the TV program which she refuses to engage in, having felt the weight of her father’s disappearance as a child.

Each of Erice’s features have dealt with Spain’s fascist trappings at the level of the family through narratives involving film exhibition. His work uses the unifying potential of cinema to reveal personal and political truths embedded in moving images. In The Spirit of the Beehive, a mobile cinema brings Frankenstein (1931) to a small village in Castile, where young Ana is traumatized by the scene where the monster accidentally drowns a little girl. In El Sur – itself an “incomplete film” based only on half of Erice’s intended screenplay – a girl follows her father to a cinema, where he agonizes over the onscreen images of his estranged love, a Spanish actress.

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Close Your Eyes also features a crucial bit of film exhibition, where the remains of The Farewell Gaze are shown in a theatre for a small, contented audience. In this magnificent sequence, Erice’s own return to form materializes from the perspective of the spectator, casting their eyes forward to understand the past. Though this intricate scenario neatly develops upon its director’s catalogue, Close Your Eyes still feels singular and prodigious – a film that works just as well for those unfamiliar with Erice, moving with the viewer to unveil its secrets.

One might be reminded of a line from The Spirit of the Beehive from which Erice’s latest film may have lifted its title: when Ana’s older sister encourages her to seek out the monster that has been plaguing her mind, she says, “If you’re his friend, you can talk to him whenever you want. Close your eyes and call him.”