Close Your Eyes
Cerrar los ojos

The first film since 1992 from acclaimed 84-year-old Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, Dream of Light) will likely be his last film as well. The fictional story is set in 2012, about twenty years after the mysterious disappearance of an actor named Julio Arenas (José Coronado) on the seacoast while shooting a film with his friend Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo). The film titled The Farewell Gaze was to be Garay's second feature, but it turned out to be his last. Now, Garay is back in the news when a popular television program revives the case of what happened to Arenas. Garay is interviewed for the program and follows up with Arenas Julio's daughter Ana (Ana Torrent), the movie's editor Max (Mario Pardo), and mutual friend and lover Lola (Soledad Villamil). Garay eventually finds some answers, but these lead to more existential questions.

Close Your Eyes is one of those long, contemplative movies that I can appreciate if not fully engage with. Perhaps I need to be older, but it's probably that I'm just not one to devote a lot of time pondering the unanswerable questions of life. Still, I found the opaque nature of Erice's story and, especially, its conclusion to be both intriguing and maddening. The picture's deliberate pace puts you in an appropriately ruminative headspace, which makes this an unusually low-key detective story and a rare unpretentious or navel-gazy film about a filmmaker in search of himself.