Commenting on art in all its extensions sometimes has a component of leave the puzzle moderately done. Not completely, because you don’t have to reveal everything to the public either. But it is true that cultural criticism, in its role of bringing author and viewer closer by extending the conversations that are extracted from the work, ends up stripping the mystery of what it seeks to comment on and, consequently, a certain wonder is taken away.
There is, of course, joy in understanding images, in processing them within a general picture, extracting from them sensations or even experiences that you did not expect. Sometimes the best works are precisely those where you can’t stop remembering those images, those moments, but there is always the risk of taking away their strength through blunt commentary. It is something that Víctor Erice warns us about in a film that will necessarily be analyzed down to the smallest detail.
Open to the mystery
It’s inevitable, of course. ‘Close your eyes’ is the long-awaited commercial return of the Basque director in the form of a feature film. His latest work in this format, the exquisite documentary ‘The quince sun‘, dates back to 1992, and before that we had two films that fit perfectly into the conversation of the best Spanish film ever made. Since then, Erice has focused on making short films or video art that have had limited dissemination. But that does not mean that he has stopped being connected to cinema at any time.
His new film precisely tries to unravel the inexplicable but powerful relationship we have with the image, using cinema as a weapon to reach the soul and memory. The way he does it partially distances himself from the style that characterizes his other two fiction films, although there is something unmistakably Erice in each moment of exploration in a more linear journey than usual.
The film is marked by the disappearance of Julio Arenas, a famous actor played by José Coronado. The mystery around him remains an obsession twenty years after suddenly vanishing during filmingand a television and investigative program wants to solve the enigma by asking for the collaboration of his close friend and last director who worked with him, Miguel Garay (an extraordinary Manolo Solo and worthy of Goya).
Garay has to reopen the trunk of memories after voluntarily accepting ostracism after his failed film career and the disappearance of his friend. The process, which almost leads him to be the protagonist of an earthy detective film, becomes an attempt to unravel the guilt and pain of memories through interactions with people from his past. That first part feels extraordinarily personal, because of how Erice explores old age or loneliness in those intimate conversations, as well as how it begins with fragments of a fictional film where she tries to recreate that failed attempt to adapt it to film.The haunting of Shanghai‘.
It is in this part of the film where Erice establishes one of his main theses regarding cinema. Through the realization of this research program that becomes a parody with all the intention, or with that conversation with the character of Ana Torrent (whose appearance feels charged with feeling, although it is almost an illusion due to the connection between actress and director in ‘The spirit of the hive’) in the heart of the Prado Museum, leads us to consider the image as an element that must be deprived of mystery today. Something very contrasting to a beginning where the imperative need to look in a special way is expressed.
The subsequent development is Erice’s attempt to recover that mystique of what we see and hear, of how those small pieces become our best company even unconsciously, sometimes even without being clear about their true meaning. The film becomes more elusive, more liquid, as it progresses with that literary structure. Which can work against the rhythm of a film that in its first section is linking events, but in exchange can deliver magical moments like that moment where the character of Solo performs a song from ‘Río Bravo’ on the guitar.
It is daring to make a film like this, full of vulnerability and mystique, when it is going to be intensely dissected and contrasted with the resounding mastery of films like ‘The South’. It’s true that ‘Close your eyes’ is more imperfect than those two works, starting with a digital photograph with which Erice does not seem to feel comfortable creating images (hence the stretches of fictional 16mm film are aesthetically more successful) and with a length of footage of almost three hours, very opposite to the friendly hour and a half durations of the other films.
Even so, Erice manages to ensure that there continue to be moments, so that there continues to be space for humanity as well as for reflection in every interaction we see, whether dialogued or not. It is a film that is not very self-absorbed, which was a risk given the cinematic nature of the story. Erice emerges from that hole with the serenity and patience of a veteran master, delivering fallible works with an attitude expressed in the film itself: “Without fear or hope.” ‘Open your eyes’ is a very worthy film for an essential filmography that could end here and one could say that it has no blemish.
