‘Close Your Eyes’: Cannes Review

Dir: Victor Erice. Spain. 2023. 169mins

One of the enduring classics of world cinema, Victor Erice’s debut Spirit of the Beehive continues to reward audiences 50 years after its release and his follow up, 1983’s El Sur, is a quiet joy – even if Erice considered it incomplete. There are tantalising glimmers of both in Close Your Eyes, the now 82-year-old director’s return to cinema after 30 years of silence (punctuated only by his 10-minute contribution to 2002 omnibus film Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet). One can only hope it is the rocky start of a late-career burst of creative energy.

Finally builds a head of emotional steam in its last half hour

As in those earlier films, Erice, here writing with Basque director and screenwriter Michel Gaztambide, uses film culture to explore both personal and national traumas. A story about an actor who disappears and resurfaces years later with memory loss is clearly also about gaps in Spanish history and collective amnesia. Yet the metaphors float, never anchored to the story as effectively as in Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers, which similarly delved into a disappearing act connected to the Franco regime and the Civil War.

Reports suggest that Erice and his team rushed to finish Close Your Eyes in time for Cannes, and it could be that a return to the edit suite after the festival may result in a different film; in its current state, this feels like a rambling almost-three-hour drama with a made-for-TV feel. Erice’s return from the wilderness will inevitably attract curious audiences on home ground, but elsewhere may struggle, notwithstanding the director’s cachet among cineastes and another attention-catching draw: the fact that Ana Torrent, the little girl from Beehive, returns here to play – once again – the daughter of a distracted father.

Close Your Eyes opens somewhere in rural France, ostensibly in 1947. In a decadent chateau, an anarchist, apparently on the run from Franco’s forces, is employed by an older compatriot to travel to Shanghai to find his estranged daughter, and bring her back. Yet this atmospheric scene is soon revealed to be one of only two surviving reels from a film directed in 1990 by Manolo Solo (Miguel Garay), who was unable to complete it because Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado), the actor who played the anarchist private investigator, disappeared during the shoot, never to be seen again. 

The film moves forward to 2012, when Manolo has been invited onto a popular TV missing persons show to discuss the Arenas case. An introverted, melancholic soul with a permanently furrowed brow, Manolo never directed another film (the parallel with Erice is ours to draw). We learn surprisingly little about him, or his real motives in suddenly deciding to pursue Julio after all this time. In a scene shot through with nostalgia for analogue film and sadness for its demise, he meets up with the film’s former editor, who has become a celluloid archivist. He checks in with an Argentinian singer who was once his lover – and also Jose’s. He goes back to his ramshackle beachside home near Almeria and spends time with an alternative family of locals. One of them plays guitar; a song is sung, and we know that we will get to hear it right to the end. Finally, almost two hours in, something finally happens, when a social worker from nearby Motril rings the TV show with new information about Jose.

Flatly shot – with the exception of the (more compelling) film within the film, with its period-appropriate depth of field and opulent noir feel – Close Your Eyes finally builds a head of emotional steam in its last half hour, while exploring questions of identity and what remains when memory has gone. It’s at this point that Ana Torrent’s character (once again called Ana) makes her second appearance, and the other extant reel of the unfinished 1990 film is shown in a shuttered local cinema that has been reopened especially for the occasion. Here, in the flickering dark, we feel some of that old Erice magic once more.