Close Your Eyes Confronts Time, Mortality, and Víctor Erice’s Legendary Career

The first place of solace Miguel goes in his search is a large storeroom of film prints carefully taken care of by his editor collaborator Max Roca (Mario Pardo, giving my favorite performance in the film—so warm but so sagely forthright) who calls his occupation “cinema archeology.” This is a space of intimacy with the celluloid image and with age. Erice concentrates on the art of projection, spinning the reels forward and backwards, showing the projected image and then changing focus to show the same image on the celluloid print. He uses this scene not only as a plot point, but as an archival illustration of something he feels is being lost.

Close Your Eyes’ conversations about memory and age are deliberately sentimental, spoken with a sense of somber dignity. The core fascinations of Erice’s approach to art remain the same. He has always been infatuated with the potent influence of the cinematic image on people. The Spirit of the Beehive centers around a young girl’s first experience watching Frankenstein. Erice is also one who evokes the deep impact of distance and the reconciliation of people over lost periods of time. El Sur takes us back and forth between a young woman and her memories of her dad before he left after the Spanish Civil War. In the same film, her father is obsessed with the elusive and mysterious actor Irene Rios. The Quince Tree Sun strikes the closest resemblance to Close Your Eyes in the way it shows the direct detrimental influence that age has on art. Made when Erice was only 52, the film was still keenly aware of the looming threat of mortality, on the film’s subject as well as Erice himself. In Close Your Eyes, these themes jarringly coalesce.

For his entire career, Erice shot on grainy film. Here only the bookends are shot on 16mm. It’s strange and sobering seeing the stark transition here, from the warm celluloid used in the opening countryside mansion sequence to the steely digital frames of an Arri Alexa capturing metro Madrid. It’s not just the look, but the sounds. The mysterious and dreamlike score turns to car horns and ringing cell phones. But it’s all part of Erice’s direct and sentimental take on remembrance and the history of cinema. Close Your Eyes features posters of Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night and a sequence in the Spanish countryside coast where Miguel and several compatriots sit at a campground and sing Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson’s “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” from Rio Bravo. 

Miguel is a character who seems to be at the center of a memory crisis on many fronts. His remembrance of his lost friend Julio, his lost relationship with his son, the memories of an unfinished film—these all play into Close Your Eyes’ melancholic feelings towards time. Miguel’s film-within-the-film may very well be Erice’s nod to a film adaptation he had planned in the early 2000s—The Shanghai Spell—which went to another filmmaker, Fernando Trueba, instead, and left Erice immensely frustrated. These unclosed loops, which time and memory fail to account for, is a consistent source of gloom in Close Your Eyes. Erice’s movies have never been upbeat, but they have always looked at the past with optimistic curiosity. Here, the past becomes something unreachable, a valley of ghosts who don’t want to be discovered and when they are, don’t want to communicate. 

Erice’s digital imagery is dark and cold. It exudes none of the rustic warmth of his past films. Instead, that warmth comes from the projector, shining its light from 16mm celluloid onto the faces of various characters. The warmth lies in books, one of which Miguel himself authored called The Ruins and discovers at a streetside vendor with a note he wrote in it dedicated to “Lola.” It exists in photographs he took with his son and a postcard where he writes to his boy, “Here I go, aimlessly.” It’s not surprising then that Erice’s film ends with Miguel’s desperate attempt to reignite memory and turn back time. When Julio seems completely lost and is unable or unwilling to remember his friends, his relationships and his career as an actor, Miguel turns to the 16mm film reels that played at the beginning of the film: The image of a younger Julio in The Farewell Gaze. The magic of the cinematic image which sparked the imagination of a young girl in The Spirit of the Beehive and mesmerized the father figure in El Sur would surely work its wonders once more. The scene is poetic, sad and sentimental—a sequence 30 years in the making. It confronts time, memory and age in a single moment and dares one to sit with these feelings and not expect any easy balms for them. As the editor of Close Your Eyes’ unfinished film says, the only successful way to face mortality is “with no fear and no hope.”

Soham Gadre is an entertainment and culture writer based in Washington D.C. He has written for Polygon, MUBI Notebook, The Film Stage, and Film Inquiry among other publications. He has a Twitter account where he talks about movies, basketball, and food.