Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice has not made a feature-length film in more than 30 years. His debut, 1973’s The Spirit of the Beehive, was an instant classic of Spanish and global cinema—it’s currently ranked 85th on the prestigious Sight & Sound list of the greatest films ever made. So any new film from him is a capital “B” Big Deal, as is the case with Close Your Eyes, which made its American premiere last month.
It’s unlikely we will get another film from Erice, who is in his mid-80s, and if he ends with this one it will be a fitting swan song. At once grounded and haunting, Close Your Eyes is the kind of carefully observed drama that you want to savor, to let it consume and ultimately overwhelm you. No superlative will quite do it justice, and in order to find anything worthy of comparison, you have to look deep into movie history. Like Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky, Erice uses his advanced age to explore memory and death with poignance and wisdom.
The first scene is a film-within-a-film. It is 1947, and, within the walls of a gorgeous mansion, a wealthy older man (José María Pou) hires a younger man (José Coronado) to find his missing daughter. This could be the setup for a noir or a mystery, except the screenplay by Erice and Michel Gaztambide avoids any genre trappings. The opening scene unfolds unhurriedly, giving us time to appreciate the gorgeous cinematography that frames the old house like a painting from a Dutch master.
We eventually learn this scene is the opening from The Farewell Gaze, an unfinished film by Miguel (Manolo Solo), Erice’s protagonist. Miguel could never finish his feature because his best friend and star, Julio (also Coronado), wandered off the set and disappeared. Now a true crime TV series wants to look into Julio’s disappearance, which stirs something in Miguel, leading him on an unlikely journey to find his friend.
Close Your Eyes has a lengthy middle section where Miguel, now living a quiet life as a translator, reconnects with key figures from his past. Julio’s memory seems to haunt everyone even though they’ve allegedly made their peace with his absence. Mostly they talk quietly, almost shyly—as if experience and age has diminished their youthful exuberance. Miguel’s ex-editor Max (Mario Pardo) is now a film archivist who doesn’t dwell on the futility of preserving film prints with few projectors to show them. Julio’s daughter (Ana Torrent) now works at the Prado Museum in Madrid, and has buried any grief over her lost parent. If Torrent’s name sounds familiar it’s likely because, as a child, she starred in Spirit of the Beehive—giving one of the greatest performances from a child actor. By casting Torrent in Close Your Eyes, Erice creates multiple opportunities for reflection, whether it’s on the time periods in this film or how these actors and directors fit into film history. By thinking about the material on several levels, we can engage the characters on a richer emotional level: Maybe Miguel once resented Julio’s disappearance, but now we can see how something more wistful and bittersweet replaces all those feelings.
The references to film history do not stop with Torrent. At one point, a drunken Miguel plays “My Rifle, My Pony and Me,” a song popularized by Ricky Nelson in the classic 1959 western Rio Bravo. What does the song mean to Erice and Miguel? Close Your Eyes doesn’t provide a direct answer. The film strikes a good balance between what is specific and what is elusive, allowing the ambiguity to intrigue us more than frustrate us. Throughout Miguel’s methodical journey, we see a man forced to accept a modest life, and find camaraderie among the others—including forgotten friends—who live with a mix of contentment and resignation. The arc of these characters, their reluctance to litigate their pasts, and how they guard dormant feelings is an affecting way to explore the nature of aging. Even if you’re nowhere near the ages of these characters, Erice finds something true and universal through conversations that suffuse nostalgia with pain.
An investigation is central to Close Your Eyes, but it’s not really a mystery film. We already know from the true crime program that Julio’s body was never recovered, which leaves a lot of room for the film’s third act to unfold. Erice avoids any big “eureka” moments and the actors are utterly convincing. With no affect or false moments to their performance, even little moments can be moving. There is a terrific, unforced scene in which Miguel uses a segment of rope to test the idea of muscle memory; it builds toward a minor victory that sets up a singular finale.
At a run time of nearly three hours, Close Your Eyes somehow never feels too long or languid. Erice opts for elongated dialogue scenes, and yet we need the extra time to understand characters who never once act like they’re in a melodrama—except for Julio, of course, who literally starred in one. The film-within-a-film creates a striking contrast for the central drama, since real life lacks the resolution or denouement of the movies, and Erice avoids further cliche by avoiding histrionics and underplaying otherwise big revelations.
All the groundwork, each of the preceding three acts, pays off with a climax that shrewdly synthesizes the plotting and thematic work that precedes it. Close Your Eyes ends with an ambiguous image, a fade to black that could be interpreted a number of ways. We cannot know the mind of Miguel and the others, just like we cannot know Erice’s, and it is only through pure cinematic power that we can find hope for any meaning. Such a realization could be maudlin in the hands of anyone else, but Erice demonstrates he still has the same ability, not unlike his hero, to captivate us just like he first did all those years ago.
Close Your Eyes (169 Minutes, not rated) opens at AFI Silver on Sept. 20 and runs through Sept. 26. silver.afi.com.