Spain’s greatest living filmmaker, Victor Erice returns with what is only his fourth feature film, and the first in 31 years. Close Your Eyes is a deeply personal movie, in part about a life devoted to cinema, but also about getting old, kinship, loss, and memory.
Twenty years after the film he was directing fell apart when the leading man, his best friend Julio (José Coronado) disappeared midway through shooting, Miguel (Manolo Solo) agrees to reopen the mystery for a tacky TV show… He needs the money, but he’s also at that age for making a reckoning with his past. He meets with the abandoned film’s editor (Mario Pardo), with a fado singer both he and Julio were in love with (Helena Miquel) and with Julio’s now middle-aged daughter (played by Ana Torrent, the child star in Erice’s first film, Spirit of the Beehive).
Approaching three hours in length, this is a film made with an eye on the long game, ruminative and melancholy, but the pay-off is consequential and soul-stirring.
A shimmery, nourishing culmination of ideas and ellipses in a career so elusive as to have taken on a mythic quality, to the point that his latest feels almost dreamed into being… In Erice’s aching, consummate return, cinema is life, but there’s life beyond it too.
Guy Lodge, Variety
A career summation and an exquisite reckoning of cinema’s power to haunt and enchant, to bring the physically or spiritually dead back to life.
Leigh Singer, Sight & Sound
It is a mysterious, digressive, long and baggily constructed film possessed of a distinctive richness and humanity, all about the balance between memory and forgetting which we all negotiate as we come to the end of our lives. Close Your Eyes meanders and twists and turns, it is expansive, garrulous and yet also downbeat and pessimistic. There is something deeply civilised and gentle about this film.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Victor Erice
Manolo Solo, José Coronado, Ana Torrent, Petra Martínez, María León, Mario Pardo, Helena Miquel, Antonio Dechent, José María Pou
Spain
2023
In Spanish with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Screenwriter
Victor Erice, Michel Gaztambide
Cinematography
Valentín Álvarez
Editor
Ascen Marchena
Original Music
Federico Jusid
Art Director
Curru Garabal
Also Playing
Filtration: Three Colours: Blue
Directly filtering the image that comes into a lens allows cinematographers to vastly alter how a scene looks and feels. We'll analyze the radical ways Kieslowski's closet collaborator, Slawomir Idziak, editorializes in such films as Three Colours: Blue.
Green Border
In her seventies Agnieszka Holland has made a ferocious, emotionally charged film about the brutal treatment of refugees arriving over the Polish land border from Belarus. This is a vehement denunciation of resurgent fascism and utterly compelling cinema.
The Goldman Case
In 1976, Jewish radical Pierre Goldman was facing the death penalty, accused of committing a double murder during an armed robbery. Goldman admitted to a string of similar robberies, but denied murder. Instead, he put the cops on trial.
His Three Daughters
Three sisters -- Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olson, and Natasha Lyonne -- congregate to attend the final few days of their father's life. They bring with them years of barely-repressed jealousy and resentment, as well as wildly different personalities.