José Coronado as Julio Arenas
At the 2023 San Sebastian International Film Festival, Victor Erice was awarded the richly-deserved and much-coveted DONOSITA LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD. He also rewarded his many fans by screening his new film Close your Eyes (2023), the first for some years. It is a fitting complement to his lifetime of awards, with 23 wins and nominations, which includes his enduringly magical film, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), that forever cemented him in the hearts of cinephiles around the world. Now the BFI is featuring Erice's work in a season including his short films, as well as his more famous features such as The Spirit of the Beehive and South.
Victor Erice, in his new film, Close your Eyes weaves a moving story around the disappearance, without trace, of a famous heart throb actor half -way through what was to be his final film. Twenty two years later, a TV Channel chooses to examine the story for its 'Unsolved Cases' programme. The director of that final film " The Farewell Gaze" is invited to participate and finds himself deep in the mystery once again, desperate to discover what really happened.
Close your Eyes touches on themes that have permeated many of his works, themes of loss, memory and identity. If we lose our memory, are we still the same person? Erice’s films are permeated with sensations of longing and loss, expressing the huge vacuum that is left behind, be it due to the disappearance of a person as in Close your Eyes, or the haunting loss of innocence and absence, as in The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) or the loss of a meaningful connection with your father as in Sur (1983). In Close your Eyes, the loss is really that of the protagonist who vanished into the mists of oblivion.
Ana Torrent in The Spirit of the Beehive (1983)
Many of Erice’s films are set around the 1940s, right at a time when the dreams of so many were shattered by the start of the long dictatorship of General Franco.
Manolo Solo as Miguel Garay and José Coronado as Monsieur Franch
Close Your Eyes opens with a film- within- a- film, and another mystery to uncover. Monsieur Lévy (the wonderful Josep María Pou), lives in a chateau called Triste le Roy (The Sad King) with his inscrutable Chinese servant. He has learnt he only has a few months of life left to live, clutching a king chess piece in his hand, he summons Monsieur Franch (José Coronado who also plays Julio Arenas) and begs him to go to Shanghai to find his daughter Judith who has been taken away by her mother and renamed Qiao Shu, whom he wishes to see before he dies.
“If you complete this mission, I will help you rebuild your life and recuperate what you lost.” (A portent of what is to come). A stunning and haunting photograph of a young girl is his only clue: “the only person who carried my blood”.
By then, I was hooked and looking forward to being carried down the dark unsavoury streets of Shanghai of the time and watching exotic junks sail past on the Yellow River.
But it was not to be. The main actor, who turns out to be Julio Arenas, disappears without trace during the shoot and the film has to be shelved.
Victor Erice directing Ana Torrent
Twenty two years later, in the autumn of Madrid in 2012, the director of this exotic tale, Miguel Garay (a brooding Manolo Solo) is invited to participate in a programme called ‘Unresolved Cases’ Marta Soriano (Helena Miquel) who leads it, has chosen to examine the cold case of the Julio Arenas disappearance.
Julio was the closest friend of the director Miguel Garay and his loss affected not only him, but everyone around them. Julio had been a hugely popular heart throb leading man, famous for his womanizing and unfailing charisma.
Did he deliberately choose to disappear or was it suicide?
When he vanished, the tabloids went viral with conspiracy theories, speculation and unverified sightings, flooding the papers. All that was actually found was his car and a pair of shoes on a beach. The process of re-examining the case falters as many witnesses have since died and forensic evidence is non-existent.
Victor Erice with Manolo Solo and José Coronado on set
All that remains are fragments of the film-within- a-film (titled ‘The Farewell Gaze’) that survived in the private vault of Miguel Garay’s friend and editor Max (a charismatic Mario Pardo). Julio Arena’s daughter, Ana Arenas (played by Ana Torrent) does not want to reopen old wounds or be associated with the programme. Ana Torrent, so well-remembered as the girl in The Spirit of the Beehive all those years ago, is still able to bring her intriguing screen magic to the screen, echoing her earlier works with Erice.
Ana Torrent as Ana Arenas and Manolo Solo as Miguel Garay
Meanwhile Miguel Garay, who had also been a writer, becomes obsessed with solving the case. What really happened? Why did they never recover a body? Garay had met his friend Julio Arenas doing military service in the Navy and the friendship had endured, even through some very harsh times in the Caranchel prison, where they were horribly tortured as political prisoners.
The film moves slowly, is it too slow? Hard to tell, the talking heads examine existential issues, ‘How to get old?’, what is a memory? Ana Arenas, for instance, can only remember “the voice on the telephone, his face was of a stranger.” That man on the screen in funny costumes was never ‘her father’. All she has is a doll, given to her by Santa Claus, not even directly by her father himself. This is all about loss, memory, identity and absence, and like in Sur, about a vacuum that can never be filled. The lead performance of José Coronado as Julio Arenas (and Monsieur Franch) is superb and totally believable.
Close Your Eyes poster
Victor Erice throws in a subtle quote and a clear-cut kick, as he refers to a book by Juan Marsé ‘Calligraphy of Dreams’. It was a sore point when, expecting to write and direct “El Embrujo de Shanghai”(2002) (known as The Shanghai Spell), artistic differences with the producer led him to abandon the film, which was eventually directed by Fernando Trueba. Here in Close your Eyes, he throws some dice in that direction and evokes some of the exotic spirit of the book.
A master at work, Victor Erice is a a poet and an intellectual, so the themes he explores are existential, philosophical and challenging but the film is not bogged down despite this, because of his innate story-telling ability and the organic manner in which he unfolds the story.
The film is imbued with mystery and peppered with wonderful characters like Miguel Garay’s friend Max, Ana Arenas and later, a superb Sor Consuelo (played by Petra Martínez). The craftsmanship in the film is immaculate. The meticulous attention to detail, and in particular in this production, the use of lighting by the cinematographer (Valentín Álvarez) works its poetic magic by echoing the story so finely.
'Close your Eyes' (2023) distributed in the UK & Ireland by New Wave Films is on an extended run at the BFI Southbank , till April 30th 2024.
Credits: -
Writer/ Director: Victor Erice/ co-writer: Michel Gaztambide/ Producers: Cristina Zumárraga, Pablo E Bossi, Victor Erice, Pol Bossi/ DOP: Valentín Álvarez/ Editor: Ascen Marchena / Sound: Ocán Marín/ Music: Federico Jusid
Cast: Manolo Solo, José Coronado. Ana Torrent, Petra Martínez, Mario Pardo, Helena Miquel, José María Pou, and Venice Franco as Qiao Shu
