Close Your Eyes is in an altogether different league the last time a Spanish master bears in a film comes after a period of almost thirty years. It is with great slowness that a well-orchestrated but highly intimate enigma is revealed as would a master painter on an intricately planned canvas. The master’s resourceful hero paperclips the jigsaw of his disarranged life around an enigma, which worked upon him and caused his depressive fall. This is the paradoxical character of love, loss and love in the process of understanding. The film is two hours and 50 minutes long requiring a level of patience that sometimes the present generation seems to have lost, but still no hurry for this story.
In the fall of 1947, calling at the impressive Triste Le Roy château, its beauty outside of Paris, is Monsieur Frank (José Coronado). An old man, Monsieur Levy (José María Pou) is the owner and he has a task to finish before he dies. He asks Franklin to search for Judith Levys daughter (Venecia Franco), whom her mother took away in Shanghai. Finally, Levy suggests that perhaps Frank had been through something like this himself.
MIGUEL GARY arrives in the office of the popular television program UNRESOLVED CASES in 2012 Madrid. This journalist, Marta Soriano (Helena Miquel), is interested in the well-known disappearance of Julio Arenas, a Spanish actor, in 1990. We find out that the very short opening credits actually belonged to a movie called The Farewell Gaze which was never completed. Arenas who played Monsieur Frank on the film got lost when the film was about to be edited. Miguel. He was a writer and director of a film which starred and featured one of his best friends Julio, who has now been bought by the interview.
Marta opens some old wounds of Miguel’s and wonders whether he has bought any of the conspiracy theories that Julio has gone missing, and neither body was discovered. Would someone kill him from jealousy? Surely, Julio was a popular womanizer. Or, an upset spouse was seeking for vengeance? There is a weary and exhausted Miguel who will not entertain such queer ideas anyway. Nevertheless, he decides to find the daughter of Julio (Ana Torrent) as well as the film’s editor (Mario Pardo). Did he forget to do anything important on that particular day then?
The absence of Julio in the story is represented from Miguel’s perspective inClose Your Eyes. Simply put, everything he treasured turned into dust when Julio evacuated. Erice purposely avoids characterizing Miguel as a man with a purpose. In the process of reanimation the туpast which is tattered and suppressed, it is money that becomes the simplest incentive. But at the slightest cracking of the door, light is able to seep in. The memories come in the form of friends, lovers, family, all of lie in the web of Julio who is uncharacteristic for Miguel.
Most of all Erice, who has very interesting Spanish characteristics, the film The Spirit of the Beehive, the film El Sur (The South), more Relations with Docu-fiction in film The Quince Tree Sun allows it to happen where it is shown how every scene develops to its optimum. Miguel engages in wrenching and at times detailed reminiscences with old friends over feelings often long placed under the surface. He tried to run away from the love of everything that was loved, haunted and enjoyed in the past, trying to run away from the pain that he was. Yet Julio is still like a ghost over a past more suffocating than looking back in anger. Miguel made the effort and tried to forget everything, but that did not subdue the memories. He is an injured man on the edges of existence who resorts to zone as the damage control. What is Manages to take Miguel into an indefatigably absorbing third act is shocking.
Close Your Eyes has no little or no revelations or surprises, epiphanies which bring joy within the unfolding of the story. It’s funny…what’s funny, though, is that there is a twist at the end of Erice’s work, which is unsurprisingly effective, as if an emotional train runs over a person, and there is not a single slight or detailed word of sex. Miguel is not Sherlock Holmes finding some elusive tiny detail which, somehow, links everything together. Erice’s screenplay has been (with a single exception) ‘real-epics’ throughout the whole drama and concluding it is also quite similar to fictional and unheard in the climax Inaim in The Farewell Gaze. We do find out the final destiny of Julio Martinez, but this is not at all what one could have thought. Answers to the most complex questions in life, often are the simplest.
Traditionally, Close Your Eyes slow-burn methodology should be incorporated in studying of one’s film in all forms documented in film schools. There are no chopping cuts, no cutting on the move, and no inclination to shoot from awkward angles. Most part of the movie is shot from a single camera master shot with the focus mainly on the central characters with a center-framed close up shot of a central character. One seems to worry rather less, since there is no such thing as background distraction. Eri cehad a filme, the way a boor’s capital advocates, for the actors to their responses to speaking and to one another. Lighting is also rather used in appliance than with instruction, for it is the mood of the drama rather than its contents which determines where the light is cast, as in lighted faces flickering shadows of fire lamps. Action is synchronized with the continuing development of the story.
There’s more than meets the eye when it comes to the task Close Your Eyes entails. It was birthed through simplicity. The formula for success is when all the components of a great script, acting, and direction come together. But there is a need for the audiences to patient and allow the film to unfold. This is not idle clickbait that is designed for the degenerate TikTok generation. The tortoise ends up winning the race in the end; Erice is no exception.
Close Your Eyes or Cerrar Los Ojos is a film in spanish with various English subtitles. It is produced by La Mirada del Adiós AIE, Tandem Films and Nautilus Films, among others.
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