The film begins with a clearly symbolic shot of a sculpture of the god Janus, the god of beginnings and endings, the double-faced month that looks to the past and the future, but the film shows little future, its ambiguous ending reveals few glimpses of any beginning, and its characters are totally devoted to the past: to their memories and their losses.
It begins with a scene from the film The Goodbye Look, directed in the 90s by Miguel Garay (played brilliantly by Manolo Soto) and starring his friend, the alcoholic actor Julio Arenas (played by José Coronado) as a detective hired by the decadent Mr. Levy, with the poetic nickname Triste Roi, to find his daughter, lost in Shanghai. He wants, he says, to be able to meet his daughter's gaze before he dies, the only gaze that at this point can mean something to him. It is clear to us that both Mr. Levy and the detective are two men who have lost contact with their daughters and that they both want to get them back. As a clue to identify the young woman, Mr. Levi gives the detective a photograph of his daughter, dressed in oriental fashion.
The scene ends (and by the way like so many other scenes in the film is beautifully shot but somewhat elongated with endless dialogue), and we already have Miguel Garay, the protagonist, already attending in the 21st century (it is not very clear when the film takes place and the age and appearance of the actors is not always consistent with the available chronology) to a television set to talk about the disappearance of Julio Arenas, which took place just after finishing filming those only two scenes of the film The goodbye look that came to be filmed before the actor's disappearance canceled filming (the first with which the film begins and the last, which we will see at the end of Close Your Eyes).
So we have an actor Julio Arenas who has lost contact with his daughter (an extraordinary Ana Torrent) playing the role of the detective also estranged from his daughter and in charge of searching for Mr. Levy's also lost daughter. As if that were not enough, the protagonist of Close Your Eyes, Miguel Garay, director of The Goodbye Look, has also lost a son in a traffic accident.
There is therefore enough room for melodrama, for many shots of the pensive, tearful, depressed characters. The entire film insistently revolves around losses: loss of daughter, loss of friend, loss of love, loss of vocations and dreams.
As I said, in the face of so many endings and so much past, the beginnings that are shown to us are however marginal, impossible or inconsequential: the protagonist's neighbors are going to have a daughter, the protagonist reunites with an old lover, the actor Julio Arenas begins his new life in an asylum, but without memories or hopes, almost idiotic by alcohol.
Everything seems impeccably put together, but insistence and redundancy is one of the problems of Close Your Eyes. Erice's previous films were a miracle of concision, of modesty, made of ellipses, silences, essential dialogues; they were films where no scene was repeated twice, nor was the same emotion of an actor insisted on twice.
Close your eyes, despite having an obviously very well-worked script, is somewhat rambling, very long and too consciously meditative. There is a lot of dialogue here, often apparently superfluous, there are scenes that one feels could have been deleted (one example among a dozen, the phone call on the fishing boat where there is no signal), a lot of timeouts and a lot of nostalgic songs, a lot of secondary characters with no greater significance than to make the protagonists aware of their irreparable losses at every moment, many tin boxes full of remnants of the past and we have the feeling of seeing Miguel Garay's pensive and sad look too many times. There are many obvious symbols (the chess piece, the sculpture of Janus, the photograph of the girl...), many mannered phrases (and not only in The Goodbye Look).
There is also a lot of homage to cinema, and again to the cinema of the increasingly remote past: Erice's own cinema, classic cinema (Chaplin, Sternberg, Río Bravo), going back to the Lumiere cinema itself; the closed movie theaters, the old projectors going back to that most basic form of animation which is the flip book.
In the end, we do not know if Julio Arenas finds on the screen, when watching the final scene of The Goodbye Look, sitting in the cinema with his real daughter, that only meaningful look from the screen with José Coronado and the girl, we are not sure that he recognizes himself on the screen, we do not think that he realizes that he sitting in the cinema with Ana Torrent is a mirror image of the screen where he is with the girl who has come to represent his daughter in his subconscious (duplicated, in the story of the protagonist in the photo booth photo with his lost son), but we do see him deeply moved. Something has struck a chord in him, perhaps a dark need that is difficult for him to put into words, the same emotion that has made him keep that photograph of the lost daughter of Triste Roi, with whom he seems to have identified so much of his own loss at the end of his filming of The Goodbye Look.
The film is visually impeccable, the performances at a very high level, often brilliant. But, nevertheless, despite so much melodramatic display, so much poeticization of loss, the film seems somewhat cold to us, its characters very distant. In The spirit of the hive, a little music from a wristwatch and an exchange of glances confronted us with a breakup and a misunderstanding between father and daughter much more exciting and moving than anything we see in Close Your Eyes. Ana's adventure had a universal meaning that gave reason to the entire film. In Closing Your Eyes we do not feel that justification, that transcending melodramatism and that the experiences of the protagonists become those of the viewer and therefore universal.
This is a good film, but far from his previous masterpieces. Anyway we must be thankful to the master for a very interesting film, and hope he will give us another in the near future.
It begins with a scene from the film The Goodbye Look, directed in the 90s by Miguel Garay (played brilliantly by Manolo Soto) and starring his friend, the alcoholic actor Julio Arenas (played by José Coronado) as a detective hired by the decadent Mr. Levy, with the poetic nickname Triste Roi, to find his daughter, lost in Shanghai. He wants, he says, to be able to meet his daughter's gaze before he dies, the only gaze that at this point can mean something to him. It is clear to us that both Mr. Levy and the detective are two men who have lost contact with their daughters and that they both want to get them back. As a clue to identify the young woman, Mr. Levi gives the detective a photograph of his daughter, dressed in oriental fashion.
The scene ends (and by the way like so many other scenes in the film is beautifully shot but somewhat elongated with endless dialogue), and we already have Miguel Garay, the protagonist, already attending in the 21st century (it is not very clear when the film takes place and the age and appearance of the actors is not always consistent with the available chronology) to a television set to talk about the disappearance of Julio Arenas, which took place just after finishing filming those only two scenes of the film The goodbye look that came to be filmed before the actor's disappearance canceled filming (the first with which the film begins and the last, which we will see at the end of Close Your Eyes).
So we have an actor Julio Arenas who has lost contact with his daughter (an extraordinary Ana Torrent) playing the role of the detective also estranged from his daughter and in charge of searching for Mr. Levy's also lost daughter. As if that were not enough, the protagonist of Close Your Eyes, Miguel Garay, director of The Goodbye Look, has also lost a son in a traffic accident.
There is therefore enough room for melodrama, for many shots of the pensive, tearful, depressed characters. The entire film insistently revolves around losses: loss of daughter, loss of friend, loss of love, loss of vocations and dreams.
As I said, in the face of so many endings and so much past, the beginnings that are shown to us are however marginal, impossible or inconsequential: the protagonist's neighbors are going to have a daughter, the protagonist reunites with an old lover, the actor Julio Arenas begins his new life in an asylum, but without memories or hopes, almost idiotic by alcohol.
Everything seems impeccably put together, but insistence and redundancy is one of the problems of Close Your Eyes. Erice's previous films were a miracle of concision, of modesty, made of ellipses, silences, essential dialogues; they were films where no scene was repeated twice, nor was the same emotion of an actor insisted on twice.
Close your eyes, despite having an obviously very well-worked script, is somewhat rambling, very long and too consciously meditative. There is a lot of dialogue here, often apparently superfluous, there are scenes that one feels could have been deleted (one example among a dozen, the phone call on the fishing boat where there is no signal), a lot of timeouts and a lot of nostalgic songs, a lot of secondary characters with no greater significance than to make the protagonists aware of their irreparable losses at every moment, many tin boxes full of remnants of the past and we have the feeling of seeing Miguel Garay's pensive and sad look too many times. There are many obvious symbols (the chess piece, the sculpture of Janus, the photograph of the girl...), many mannered phrases (and not only in The Goodbye Look).
There is also a lot of homage to cinema, and again to the cinema of the increasingly remote past: Erice's own cinema, classic cinema (Chaplin, Sternberg, Río Bravo), going back to the Lumiere cinema itself; the closed movie theaters, the old projectors going back to that most basic form of animation which is the flip book.
In the end, we do not know if Julio Arenas finds on the screen, when watching the final scene of The Goodbye Look, sitting in the cinema with his real daughter, that only meaningful look from the screen with José Coronado and the girl, we are not sure that he recognizes himself on the screen, we do not think that he realizes that he sitting in the cinema with Ana Torrent is a mirror image of the screen where he is with the girl who has come to represent his daughter in his subconscious (duplicated, in the story of the protagonist in the photo booth photo with his lost son), but we do see him deeply moved. Something has struck a chord in him, perhaps a dark need that is difficult for him to put into words, the same emotion that has made him keep that photograph of the lost daughter of Triste Roi, with whom he seems to have identified so much of his own loss at the end of his filming of The Goodbye Look.
The film is visually impeccable, the performances at a very high level, often brilliant. But, nevertheless, despite so much melodramatic display, so much poeticization of loss, the film seems somewhat cold to us, its characters very distant. In The spirit of the hive, a little music from a wristwatch and an exchange of glances confronted us with a breakup and a misunderstanding between father and daughter much more exciting and moving than anything we see in Close Your Eyes. Ana's adventure had a universal meaning that gave reason to the entire film. In Closing Your Eyes we do not feel that justification, that transcending melodramatism and that the experiences of the protagonists become those of the viewer and therefore universal.
This is a good film, but far from his previous masterpieces. Anyway we must be thankful to the master for a very interesting film, and hope he will give us another in the near future.