Spain, Argentina, 2023
Directed by Víctor Erice
With Manolo Solo (Miguel Garay), Jose Coronado (Julio Arenas), Ana Torrent (Ana Arenas), Mario Pardo (Max Roca), Helena Miquel (Marta Soriano), María León (Belén Granados)
“Cerrar los ojos – Close the Eyes”: what a weird, counter-intuitive, absurd way to title a film it is. It is on the contrary with eyes wide open that the audience go to the theater, expecting a spectacle and a narrative that would move them, especially coming from so praised but so rare a filmmaker – Victor Erice has only in 2023 sixteen directorial credits, most of them for shorts or segments he contributed to an anthology films, which leaves only four features of his own, including this one which was made thirty years after the previous one.
And the audience, at first, seemed right to have patiently waited and then rushed to the theater while the title feels truly inadequate: the film is off on a wonderfully classical cinematic start, the elegant and precise shooting of a strange encounter in an old French countryside mansion, an old, sick, wealthy, world-wearied fellow asking a younger, washed-up, poor, insecure combatant for the Spanish Republic to find his Chinese-born daughter. The shots, the cinematography, the lines, the sense of strangeness and melancholy suffusing the delicate images are awesome even though they look like they could have been shot decades earlier, the vision of an old master sure of his ways and blatantly unconcerned by the zeitgeist.
That was a red herring, though. These images belong to a fictional film which was never finished, as the lead actor, Julio Arenas, vanished during the shooting. Nobody knew what happened and no body was ever found. The director, and the actor’s best friend, Miguel Garay, had to stop the whole business. But the few reels he made are now requested, as well as his memories and confessions, by a television producer. Twenty years after Julio Arenas’ disappearance, Marta Soriano, who hosts a weekly show about this kind of unexplained and above all unresolved cases of disappearances, has decided that she would tackle the Julio Arenas case. Reluctantly, Miguel Garay accepts to give some elements of his aborted work and an interview.
As he tries to remember and to come to terms with the painful loss of a longtime, dear mate, the film increasingly focuses mainly on a man who did not experience the happiness and the success he hoped. Miguel Garay has never been allowed to shoot another film and became somehow famous thanks to a handful of novels but made actually a living by churning out screenplays; he now lives in an Andalusian seaside village in a trailer, making money by translating essays, enjoying the company of his very few neighbors and fishing, with a dog as his only companion at home; a car crash killed long ago his son and his wife left. And of course there are many regrets and that disappearance of Julio. Inquiry about an absence spawns thus a poignant portrait of a humble and disappointing life whose features are given out slowly, tactfully and thoughtfully, the film taking its time (it is 169-minute long) and avoiding to sound sentimental while fully capturing the melancholy of a character actor Manolo Solo plays with restraint and gracefully.
The program is broadcast. And a miracle happens. The case worker of a small nursing home run by nuns in a village close to Miguel’s home recognizes one of the old person as Julio Arenas. Dynamic, dedicated, gentle Belén Granados gets in touch with the retired director and convinces him to pay a visit. Miguel must acknowledge she is right but then, what to do with an old man who has lost his memory? Miguel hangs around, tries to befriend the fellow who is known to the nuns as Gardel, reckons how to make him retrieve his memories. He calls Ana Arenas, Julio’s daughter who had just a distant relationship with the actor and is not sure if she really wants to meet him again, and asks his best friend Max Roca, a longtime editor in the Spanish movie industry who owns the copy of his unfinished feature, to bring in the reels – maybe watching these shots can help Julio. And then maybe not.
It is hard to overlook the life of Erice, now 83, from the film he releases. The period when Miguel tries to make his sophomore feature matches the moment (the early 1990s) when Erice was celebrated for his third feature, “El sol del membrillo – Dream of Light”, actually a documentary, which turned out to be his last completed feature project before a three decades gap. The cinematic inactivity of the fictional artist reflects the real artist’s own (up to a point, of course). If looking back on his work and a lost friendship drives naturally Miguel to think over his art and life, the film tracking his story looks inevitably like a viewpoint of Erice about the way cinema has evolved since 1992 and is shaped by Erice’s own work and love for cinema. Julio’s daughter is played by actress Ana Torrent, who was the little daughter of the intellectual and beekeeper whose house is the center of Erice’s groundbreaking 1973 film, “El espíritu de la colmena – The Spirit of the Beehive”, while Max Roca’s house looks like a museum where countless old reels, but also posters and books, and of course the chats he has with his pal Miguel, point to a deep-rooted, unwavering commitment for cinema, with big names getting revered religiously. Nods to cinema history are also made in other ways, conjuring up memories of a Howard Hawks western or a Joseph von Sternberg exotic drama.
And a few things are pointedly bemoaned, from the cherished celluloid film getting discarded and replaced by the all-powerful digital tools to the dull television programs wielding ever more influence. As the oldies are plunged in the past, and with such despondent film titles as “Cerrar los ojos – Close the Eyes” and, in the case of the fiction within the fiction, “La mirada del adiós – The Farewell Gaze”, Erice sounds like riffing on the old theme of Jean-Luc Godard about the ever looming death of cinema. (And as Miguel is shot translating a biography of a flamboyant and mysterious Jewish producer, Michal Waszynski, who may have lied a lot about his life, has been involved in skulduggery, but did help Spain to be a place where shooting films was considered great, Erice is keen to show he is under no illusion about the ability of cinema of not just telling lies but also thrives on them, including financially).
Yet like Godard Erice keeps shooting and inventing, crafting images that are testament of the power of the cinema. Godard, like Carl Theodor Dreyer or Ingmar Bergman, in particular emphasized the power of face, and this is what Erice displays with eagerness and emotion. His characters talk and his camera knows how to capture their miens and moods, narrowing brilliantly the focus to make intense, even upsetting, closeups. And the impact gets even stronger and emotional as the character’s eyes stare directly into the camera’s eye. An expressive stare directed at us slowly emerge as a genuine leitmotif, even inside the film within the film which was supposed to end, indeed, by two characters looking at the audience, the man hired for the search, played by Julio, and the girl he found in the course of his adventures that were not to be shot.
The point of this quest for the old man employing the man and having fathered the girl was to have a look at his daughter just before death catches on him – and indeed he dies in the minutes following the arrival of the girl, giving a heartbreaking literal meaning to that fiction’s title. This was old age fighting to get a last wish fulfilled – and that points to a deeper theme of the film.
To Max, the real trouble with Julio was the actor was not ready to embrace old age. He disappeared, only to get older in another, more painful way; meanwhile Miguel and the others have aged the best way they could, and so did the cinema and the world. With a long, poignant last part fittingly taking place in a nursing home, “Cerrar los ojos – Close the Eyes” is a hard look at how old age seizes us and how individuals struggle to cope with the inevitable. What makes all those stares even more moving to us may be precisely that they come from those individuals in this juncture of their lives: if the film’s creation is informed by Erice’s career and ideas, so his experience of getting old clearly shaped the emotions of his characters and the quality of his narrative, told to an audience who are bound to go through the same phase, if it is not already done.
Miguel asks Max at one point what is the best way to get old and to accept it. The straightforward and witty guy answers, “Without fear and without hope”. And it is arguably without fear and without hope that Erice shoots this meditation on age, going as far as acknowledging that getting old, and getting ready to die, also means bidding farewell to cinema, to close the eyes on the fictional world that once mattered so much to life, was also perhaps in better shape than it seems to be in the 2020s, and nevertheless inspires one to make such a great melancholy tale and touching tribute to the magical relation between the eyes on the silver screen and those in the movie theater. Anyway, cinema has now produced so many stirring images, great memories, fierce disputes that it has acquired a status of art outlasting any spectator’s lifetime, as evidenced by the film’s references. Those who must depart can console themselves, if they wish, with the knowledge that others stand ready to open their eyes and keep the magic alive in the theaters and beyond, for instance by watching a film made by one Victor Erice, one of the best in the year 2023.