The first feature that Victor Erice directed, 1973’s “The Spirit of the Beehive,” begins in the 1940s, when a traveling cinema arrives in a small rural town in Spain to project “Frankenstein.” In the crowd of moviegoers, a child with eager eyes stands out, Ana (Ana Torrent), whose sister will later reassure her that in cinema nobody dies and everything is but a trick. Still, what Ana sees on screen will slowly seep into her reality, blurring the division between the fate of the misunderstood monster of make-believe, and the actions of those near to her.
In 1983’s “El Sur,” a project never finished to Erice’s liking but released nonetheless, another young girl finds in the movies a crucial piece of information to decipher her father’s unspoken anguish. To opens one’s eyes, Erice suggests, is to come to terms with how little we understand about the pain of others, even those we deeply love. For Erice, a master, cinema works as a revelatory force that can illuminate our truest feelings and yearnings, despite the efforts of some of his characters to escape their torturous pasts.
One gets the sense that Erice, who counts famed directors such as Pedro Almdóvar and Guillermo del Toro among his admirers, has been eulogizing cinema ever since he started making his sporadic but delicately profound movies.
Against all prognostications, Erice has returned three decades after his last effort (a 1992 documentary called “Dream of Light”), as if to have a final say about his own artistic legacy. The themes that have recurrently consumed the 84-year-old — the specter of the Spanish Civil War, daughters estranged from fathers with peculiar histories, the merciless march of time — coalesce into the unhurried, poetically rewarding “Close Your Eyes,” his fourth film in 50 years and likely his last.
Interpreted as the auteur’s confession through surrogate filmmaker character Miguel (Manolo Solo), “Close Your Eyes” acquires a layered, contemplative quality. Can we truly learn about an artist through their work or is creation just another mask? Miguel’s career aspirations died when his best friend and renowned actor Julio Arias (a marvelous José Coronado in a sort of dual role) vanished without a trace while they filmed a period piece titled “The Farewell Gaze,” a movie within the movie about a mysterious idealist entrusted with finding a wealthy man’s long-lost daughter. Only two pivotal scenes from that uncompleted venture were finished, the opening and its poignant ending.
Miguel dives back into that chapter of his life when a television program focused on unresolved cases seeks to unearth whether Julio, a womanizer afraid of getting older, died in an accident or by suicide, or if a mental breakdown allowed him to start over without a single memory of the man he once was. A partial answer does surface halfway through “Close Your Eyes,” but that’s just another door Erice entices us to walk through — not, by any means, a neat resolution.
Using a style of elegant lyricism, which enshrines tiny moments into glisteningly miraculous turning points, Erice lets the exchanges between the people he’s conceived play out without the need to advance the plot. His purpose, if there is one explicitly, is to enrich our minimal comprehension of the lives unfolding in his truthful fictions; a substantial segment in “Close Your Eyes” is dedicated to Miguel’s simple existence by the shore, fishing. We also learn about his own romantic regrets, his enduring friendship with a celluloid-devoted film editor and the unbearable loss of a child.
Obsessed with his actors’ power and symbolism, Erice appears to cast them based on their eyes, more specifically their incandescent expressiveness. That certainly appears the case with Solo. You will also recognize the inquisitive gaze of the child protagonist from “Beehive” in Torrent, now appearing in “Close Your Eyes” as Julio’s daughter, a woman in her 50s. Torrent is older now than Erice was when they made their first movie, and it serves as a moving reminder both of the years that have passed and how a person’s inherent essence is immutable across time. Cinema holds the frozen memory of Torrent as a kid, but reality has moved on.
That Torrent returned to collaborate with Erice after five decades — again playing a movie lover searching for answers — reads beautifully self-referential. That’s the crux of “Close of Your Eyes,” and of Erice’s concise body of work: Cinema crystallizes something that reality alone can’t, convincing us that perhaps what we need exists somewhere outside of ourselves, somewhere we can only access through the screen. It’s a reflection and an illusion at once.
Though film can trigger a memory-induced epiphany, it’s not the remedy itself, but an invitation to look inward, to close one’s eyes and find what’s inalienable about yourself.
In the monumental final frame of “Close Your Eyes,” the most soul-stirring ending of the year, Erice’s camera shuts its eyelids one last time, a humble sign of acceptance. Even within their limitations, the movies do see us.
