Victor Erice’s first new feature in 30 years opens with another movie called The Farewell Gaze, about an old man who hires another man to go to China and retrieve the daughter he never met. This movie-within-the-movie, we learn, was filmed in 1992 and never finished because the lead actor, Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado), disappeared during the production and was never seen again. The director, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), couldn’t go on without Arenas and never made another movie. Though he started out as a respected novelist, he stopped writing, too, and turned to translating to eke out a living. But in 2012, the producer of a TV documentary series covering unsolved cases contacts Garay to talk about Arenas’s disappearance. While he isn’t inclined to return to that sad chapter of his life, he needs the money, and while the interview doesn’t go particularly well, he is compelled to reenter the mystery.

The leisurely detective story that follows does not promise closure. During the course of Garay’s investigation, we learn a lot about him and a lot about Arenas. Both were acquaintances and even spent some time in jail together at the end of the Franco regime before either became famous; or, at least, Arenas did. As an actor he was a notorious ladies man, and when he disappeared the Spanish tabloids assumed it had something to do with a woman he shouldn’t have been seeing. Garay, however, has always held a different theory, that his friend just wanted to start over as someone else, and much of the dialogue in this dialogue-heavy movie is about wishing you were someone else or trying to change what you’ve become by obliterating the past, even if it’s just in your mind. In Garay’s case, he wants to forget his dead son, an artist like him. He now lives in a trailer on a stretch of beach whose owner may soon kick him and other squatters off, and in a sense, his quest to find out what happened to Arenas gives him the only purpose he’s had in years, so when he comes across a lead that seems to go somewhere, he wonders if it’s really worth his while to pursue it.

Of course he can’t ignore it, but there’s a sense of him getting dragged back into something that he once regretted. Erice’s film is almost 3 hours long, and it builds to such a relentlessly melancholy epiphany that the story consumes itself. The past is always there and won’t disappear, no matter how much you try to will it away. This is a movie about how movies preserve the irretrievable past. Just as a “person is more than a memory,” as Garay observes, a film is more than celluloid and chemicals, and even if he didn’t finish his own movie (which looks pretty interesting) Garay knows that it will always be there in his mind. Close Your Eyes has the same effect: It lingers in the brain and changes with each new thought. When you close your eyes, it’s even more vivid. 

In Spanish and French. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Close Your Eyes home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 La Mirada del Adiós A.I.E., Tandem Films S.L., Nautilus Films S.L., Pecado Films S.L., Pampa Films S.A.