Close Your Eyes

At the beginning of Close Your Eyes, the recent film by Spanish director Victor Erice, is a beautifully composed and acted opening scene, set at a country home outside of Paris in 1947. It’s a lovely estate called Triste Del Ray, which means “sadness of the king.” In a large ornate living room, a dying man, an old magisterial Jewish Spaniard played by José María Pou, is hiring a middle-aged Spaniard, played by Jose Coronado, to find his lost teenage daughter in Shanghai. The mystery of this daughter and the man hired to find her promises to be an adventure. But, immediately, the movie pulls the rug out from under us.

What we’ve just been watching is not the story, after all, but a scene from an unfinished movie that was shot in 1990, entitled “The Farewell Gaze.” The actor playing the hired detective in “The Farewell Gaze” was one of Spain’s major movie starts, Julio Arenas. But after shooting a few scenes, Arenas walked off the set and disappeared. No body was ever found, although it’s rumored that he jumped off a cliff into the sea.

Cut to 22 years later, in 2012: the director of “The Farewell Gaze,” Miguel Garay, played by Manolo Solo, is still haunted by what happened to his friend. Arenas’ disappearance was also a reason that Garay stopped making movies. Now an “Unsolved Mysteries” type TV show offers to help him find the truth. Why did Arenas vanish? Is he alive somewhere? From here on, the film is about Garay’s search for his friend, but he also takes a journey through his past, and the people who were important to him as a man and a filmmaker.

The fragility of memory is a fit subject for the 83-year-old Erice. With just four features in fifty years, plus a few shorter films, his work has been out of the ordinary. He has a commitment to cinema based on it as an experience and not as a commodity or a diversion. Realism is at one with metaphor in his films. All the ideas and references in this movie tie together into a many-faceted visual form.

Solo plays our central character with a gravely calm stoicism. He is ready to face the mystery of the other, whatever it might mean. In the role of Arenas, Coronado is a captivating and inscrutable presence, a complicated figure who seems to have stepped beyond his own mortality. I suppose I should mention that all of this is fiction: the film, the film within the film, the characters in each. But part of Erice’s greatness is that he doesn’t consider fiction and nonfiction as valid categories. The experience in his cinema is never untrue—there are always the possibilities of perceiving the truth in our lives.

Here, Erice is mining the recognition that movies can show us long-dead people as if they were still with us. Close Your Eyes thus looks back on life with the calm closed eyes of death. It’s a mournful and beguiling meditation on the merging of life and film. We’re in the hands of a master throughout.