VICTOR ERICE: CLOSE YOUR EYES/CERRAR LOS OJOS (2023) - NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL


MANOLO SOLO IN CLOSE YOUR EYES

Worlds within worlds; a brilliant late interrogation of memory and cinema

Cerrar los ojos begins with a scene that's deceptive: set in 1947 Paris, it's really a long segment of a film called The Farewell Gaze/La mirada del adiós that was never finished, because its lead actor (Jose Coronado) disappeared. And it's a scene where a big bearded man wearing a turban that's almost a crown - and he refers to "the sad king" and the chess piece of the white king: he's a kind of giant chess piece himself - asks this man to find his lost daughter, who must be 14 now. When the film itself begins it focuses on the search for this lost actor.

So a film within a film with a search within a search. At the end, twenty years later, the director of the unfinished film (Manolo Solo) goes to find the lost actor. The two men were friends. In their youth, they joined the navy together: there is an old photograph in their uniforms, in their "silly hats." The director appears on a TV show about the "lost actor", and when the show appears, someone calls in who recognizes the actor. He is in an "asilo" where she works. The film ends with the director's moving into the "asilo" and attempting to reawaken his lost actor friend's apparently long paralyzed memory. Amnesia seems to have been the cause of his disappearance; or perhaps he disappeared and then got amnesia, we don't know the order of events.

The character in the clip who was sent to find someone "disappears," that is, the actor does. And then he is found. Is the last part of the film real? What is clear is that this work by the noted Spanish filmmaker, member of a generation that included Carlos Saura, itself on the verge of disappearing, represents Erice's first feature film in three decades. What has he been doing? Has he been lost? He does have an unfinished film: there are autobiographical ements in this new, completed one.

Certainly Victor Erice has not lost the gift for resonant cinema he showed in his few earlier notable works - El Sur (1983), The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and Dream of Light (1992). And in the closing sequence of this film he also focuses on and cherishes cinema. (As pointed out by Jordan Mintzer in his admiring Hollywood Reporter review, Erice's films have always included strong references to "cinema’s powers to captivate and transform," and those are very much present here too.) The early part of the director-investigator's process involves meeting with a librarian of old celluloid film - including the unfinished one. When the actor is found, this custodian is summoned to play the unfinished film in an old cinema near the "asilo." There are a few people in the audience including the lost actor, the director, the TV interviewer, the lost actor's daughter, and others.

This is a specific story, though it is as symbolic and resonant as, say, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. The whole film is filled with a meditative, sweetly melancholy quality that is very beautiful. Erice moves at his own studied pace. Arguably the early sequences, when the whole situation is being set up, are slow and unnecessarily lengthy; but there may be riches in the Spanish dialogue that elude this reviewer. There is no doubt that the whole builds to a delicate, thought-provoking conclusion Sadly, this film may be a little too quiet for theatrical audiences. But it will remain as a treat for fans of Spanish cinema, evidently a final, late-arriving cap on the limited but distinguished career of a director who, at 83, may not have another film, since thirty years from now he won't be around.

Close Your Eyes/Cerrar los ojos, 169 mins., premiered at Cannes in its Cannes Première section May 22; also shown at Toronto, San Sebastián, Taiwan and BFI London. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, where it is shown Oct. 4, 2023. Metacritic rating: 86%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.