A vanished star links the movies and mortality in the captivating Close Your Eyes

The first 20 minutes of Close Your Eyes are better than almost every other movie this year, and they’re merely the memories of its main character—a ghost story written in celluloid. This prelude details a call to adventure, a request to seek out a dying rich man’s daughter for the only goodbye the elderly man still cares about. Its setting is ornate, its colors lush, its inciting incident full of captivating emotion. And then it freezes, and fades. That opening scene is one of the only remaining fragments of The Farewell Gaze, which director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) watched slip from his fingers after its star Julio Arenas (José Coronado) vanished mid-production.

Decades later, those snippets of 16mm remain the most durable memorial to Julio’s life, until one of those leering, Cold Case Files-style shows approaches Miguel with all the best intentions (and a paycheck for the film rights). Airing the details of Julio’s disappearance thrusts those he left behind back into the past. They include his daughter Ana (Ana Torrent), lover Lola (Soledad Villamil), best friend Miguel, and the Julio-sized hole he left in the movies at large—and The Farewell Gaze in particular. Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice draws us into the growing bonfire of these rekindling connections, patiently but persistently. Throughout its examination of memory, identity, passion, and, of course, the movies themselves, Close Your Eyes is senescent cinema, defined by its maker’s age and by its preoccupation with how your priorities ebb and flow as you grow old.

Erice (El Sur, The Spirit Of The Beehive) is a returning legend, offering his first feature in 30 years. The writer/director is 82, and this is only his fourth film. Miguel is even less lucky: He never directed again after The Farewell Gaze fell apart. Though there are certainly autobiographical elements baked into this character’s frustrations and mellowed-out acceptances, Erice never brings bitterness or venom to this obviously personal story. Even when directly dealing with the digitizing changes impacting moviemaking—as Erice does during warm, buzzed scenes Miguel spends sipping whiskey with his editor pal Max (Mario Pardo)—he does so with candor and wit. When Max says that one must face death “with no fear and no hope,” you know he also speaks about the fate of his film reels.

Movies and mortality are linked throughout the engrossing three-hour drama. Close Your Eyes plays out like a feature-length examination of the old idea that you don’t really die until you fade from the mind of the last person who remembers you. In this case, those memories are backed up on film stock. Your face, your movements—they create a specter, preserved until even that is exorcized by time. Part of Julio left, but it’s a bittersweet gift that part of him stuck around. 

Close Your Eyes’ aesthetic fades from the tactile grain of its film-within-a-film into that of the clinical interview show, as stark and gray and clean as Madrid. But the film gets color back into its cheeks after it leaves that studio, when its characters swap tales of the old times and make memories with the younger generation that will one day become tales themselves. Erice nods to his own career with a small conversation between Miguel and Ana. The latter recalls watching Julio’s performances in old movies, but not quite recognizing the familiar face as her father. Torrent, reuniting with Erice after starring in The Spirit Of The Beehive at age seven (a film all about how a movie could impact a young girl), is now almost 60. Her brief scene is stunning, carrying the weight of a lifetime. Later, Erice nods to the long, cyclical afterlife of movies when Miguel leads his neighbors—one pregnant, another nicknamed “Bigfoot”—in a sing-a-long performance of Rio Bravo’s “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me.” These are the things we remember.

While there is a larger plot to Miguel’s travels and all that the true-crime show dredges up, Close Your Eyes is compelling almost despite it. It’s a movie of long, two-person conversations and slow fades. It’s a movie of Solo’s small smiles, bagged eyes, and devotion to a friend—even if that friend doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a movie less interested in dealing out answers and incidents than it is in observing Miguel’s small life in a trailer park by the coast—fishing, smoking, drinking, growing tomatoes, petting his dog. 

Is it sad that this one-time filmmaker and novelist is now living on the fringes, making a living by translating other people’s ideas? That depends on if you share Erice’s perspective, which paints Miguel’s simple life as idyllic, if impermanent. If that viewpoint is a compromise made begrudgingly over the years, Erice hides it well.

Though Erice has had his artistic struggles, specifically with The Shanghai Spell, a film taken away from him and given to another director, his ties to Miguel are strongest when relating to the more general passage of time. Close Your Eyes is so gripping and so moving because Erice convincingly lays out how, as the years go by, you build such an intimate relationship with your own past that the life you’ve lived is almost as tangible as the life you’re still living. This turns the stereotype of old men sitting around remembering when into a lovely ritual, where past and present—lost and present—unite. Of course, the finale takes place in a movie theater, where life and death are more flexible than anywhere else. A little light, a little electricity, and the dead walk among us again.

The part of The Farewell Gaze that opens Close Your Eyes is concerned with a meaningful goodbye, a goodbye that matters because the daughter giving it looks at her dying father like nobody else. It’s an understanding that neither film nor film-within-a-film links specifically to fatherhood, but to a perception of something eternal that cuts through the shifting roles one takes on over the course of their life. Close Your Eyes is full of changed names, nicknames, acquired and shed identities, actors playing characters. Truly seeing (and therefore loving) the elemental beyond those details is an ability cultivated over a lifetime.

Director: Victor Erice
Writer: Victor Erice, Michel Gaztambide
Starring: Manolo Solo, José Coronado, Ana Torrent, Petra Martínez, María León, Mario Pardo, Helena Miquel, Antonio Dechent
Release Date: August 23, 2024