Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los Ojos in the original Spanish) makes it four full films in 50 years for writer/director Victor Erice. Hardly a punishing workrate. But then when your debut was The Spirit of the Beehive – often touted as the best Spanish film ever made – you can pretty much go at your own pace.
Close Your Eyes does too, moving at a speed that would be considered glacial if it were almost any other director, but is a delicious, tantalising linger in the hands of Erice.
A thriller, believe it or not, though a fairly existential one, about a famous actor who disappears off the face of the earth just as he’s losing the looks that made him a star, and the director of the missing actor’s last film, who is prompted into turning detective when a TV show decides to do a story on the missing man.
Twenty years have passed, though, and so the trail is fairly cold. As is the career of our detective, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), who directed Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado) back in the 1990s but has done very little since – bit of writing, bit of translating but mostly living in a shack by the sea where he helps a friend on his fishing boat.
Garay is, if you like, another version of Elliott Gould in The Long Good Friday, a dog-eared detective constantly down on his luck, asking questions, probing gently, trying to find the whereabouts of a missing person, in this case the man who happened to have also ruined his career.
It’s an elegy for two wrecked lives then, though the ripples spread outwards. To the daughter Arenas left behind. To the lover both Arenas and Garay shared when they were much younger men. But it’s also an elegy for an era, the analogue world of cassette tapes, pen and ink and folding money. And, in the shape of the director who is no longer is a director, for a world where cinema mattered and movies were shot on celluloid and wove their magic in the dark.
There’s a soundtrack, by Federico Jusid, but it is barely brought into play – a tremble here, a shimmer there – and Erice shoots his characters up large on the screen, in long static shots, an edit indicating a decisive moment. Solo’s large eyes do a lot of work. He’s the intelligent inquisitor, rarely letting on what he’s thinking, or exchanging snippets of information for more information, charmingly but guardedly.
Everything is downbeat – the flat lighting, the out-of-season seaside locations, the shack where Garay lives. Meetings take place in bland offices and functional cafeterias. The actors are low key, almost deadpan, though Erice’s punishingly close camera is watching them like a hawk.
If you want a thriller that stops at the usual waystations, in a way Erice gives us one of those too. His film opens with a long scene from the film that Garay is shooting with Arenas in the 1990s. And at the end it returns to the same film – also about a missing person and a diffident detective – where the sleuth triumphs, the missing person is found and an emotional reconciliation is made. This film within the film is parodic though not cruel. It looks like it would be well worth watching.
All the beats of the regular missing-person thriller are present and correct in Close Your Eyes but Erice has shorn them of cliché. This is a movie determined to move at its own pace – it even pauses while Garay sings a song at one point. The song, the film, the film within the film, the performances, everything here is entirely hypnotic.
Close Your Eyes – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
