Review: In ‘Close Your Eyes,’ Time Passes with Palpable Intensity – The Village Voice

Who knew Victor Erice was still around, ready for an octogenarian’s victory lap, with what is just his fourth feature film in over 60 years. Returning like the Ghost from Art Film Past, Erice has been MIA since 1992, when his last film, the quasi-doc The Quince Tree Sun, emerged and stood as the only significant challenge to his first film, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), as the greatest Spanish movie ever made. We can only guess at what motivates a globally acclaimed filmmaker, with that kind of lock on his nation’s legacy, to disappear for more than three decades — it’s as if he assumed we wouldn’t be interested, and/or as if he thought he was just going to live forever.

As it is, that vast yawn of frittered years inevitably punctuates how we see Erice’s new film, whatever else is going on, and in fact Close Your Eyes is categorically an old man’s movie, entirely formed around the sense of time having already passed you by. With its length (10 minutes shy of three hours), unhurried pacing, and air of rueful retrospection, there’s a feeling of sitting at the slow-moving man’s side, not watching the clock, and patiently letting him spin his yarn his way. It’s not a film about our enthrallment; it’s about Erice, and he’s earned it like a civil servant’s pension.

The film’s first act is a feint — an ex-Loyalist fighter (José Coronado) is summoned, in 1947, to the lavish chateau of an aging Sephardic Jew (Josep Maria Pou), and is unhurriedly given an assignment: Travel to Shanghai to find the old man’s half-Chinese daughter — who, in the first of the movie’s cinephiliac allusions, has been theatrically trained in the “Shanghai gesture.” (Meta-camp-exotic reference to Josef von Sternberg’s outrageous 1941 film fully intended.) We settle in, only to have a voiceover inform us that this footage, shot in 1990, belongs to an unfinished movie, and that the actor played by Coronado, Julio Arenas, disappeared without a trace immediately thereafter.

Erice is using time — the stretch of it, the waste of it, the dread of its inevitability — like he hasn’t before, as material as well as subject.

Cut to 2012, as the film-within-a-film’s grizzled director, Miguel (Manolo Solo), long retired, shows up at the production office of an unsolved-mysteries TV show to sign over the rights to use the footage for a program exploring Arenas’s disappearance. Erice is baiting us, setting up a classical mystery narrative using old celluloid as evidence — but the old-school satisfactions of such a construction are not interesting to him, any more than the identity of the fugitive in The Spirit of the Beehive or the outcome of the painting in The Quince Tree Sun ever were. Rather, the movie follows the exhausted and quite cagey Miguel’s autumnal meanderings through the detritus of his life: not merely the unfinished film and the potential fate of the vanished actor (who was a lifelong friend, and anti-Franco prison buddy as well), but the remembered death of his son, the fate of an old lover, his own failures as a writer and artist, and, naturally, the remnants of a passion for movies, which are themselves physical memories of an otherwise unretrievable history.

No spoilers, but the mystery of what happened to Arenas has legs, as it happens, and Miguel becomes activated, shall we say, in aligning the unresolved past with the bitter present. But there’s little narrative urgency — it doesn’t matter very much what happened to Arenas, and we’ve been prepped by the film’s longueurs and sad temperature not to expect a pulpy revelation. If anything, whatever the “true story” ends up being, it’s just another manifestation of the merciless roll of time. Close Your Eyes is easily the talkiest of Erice’s films (not a high bar to pass), but Erice is also using time — the stretch of it, the waste of it, the dread of its inevitability — like he hasn’t before, as material as well as subject. It feels a bit, in its wizened take on measuring out life’s regrets, like late-phase Manoel de Oliveira, when the Portuguese legend was in his 90s. Enormous swaths in Erice’s film are spent just hanging out. Deep in, once Miguel returns from Madrid to his coastal shack-trailer and we see what his retiree’s life really looks like, he spends an affectionate drinking bout and songfest with a few locals, a long and leisurely interlude that “goes” nowhere but, for a change, lives vividly in the right-now, not in memory.

Erice is quite obviously indexing his own life as a cineaste throughout — he even casts Ana Torrent, the iconic 7-year-old heroine of The Spirit of the Beehive, as the estranged grown daughter of Arenas, and, in a bit role, the Spanish theater legend Juan Margallo, who played the wounded Loyalist fugitive in that first film, so long ago. We even get to wrestle with a giant old analog film projector in a closed and obsolete small-town movie house, where the film’s climax comes, irresolutely, by way of forgotten celluloid. In the film and out of it, the differences between the past and movies are, for this codger as well as his characters, all but irrelevant. These resonances overlap and stew, just as classic film culture, like Erice, slowly fades to black.  ❖

Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.