At the Melbourne International Film Festival - Rod Bishop discovers 'the near perfect" CLOSE YOUR EYES (Victor Erice, Spain, Argentina, 2023)

 

After a 30-year absence, Spanish director Victor Erice (above, The Spirit of the Beehive) has reappeared with his fourth feature. 

Memory, death, friendship, love and truncated careers meld into the 84-year-old Erice’s three-hour film, his masterly control and quiet formalism recalling, and comparable with, the later films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

For those who believe the best of cinema is preferable to real life, there’s a lot to relish in this story of a “heart-throb” actor who walked off a film set 20 years ago. He left no trace, no body, and the film unfinished. Many presumed suicide, but the film’s director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), an old friend of the actor, thinks otherwise.

Miguel talks of his doomed film on an investigative television program and it produces one viewer who claims to know of the actor’s possible location. Miguel sets out to find him.

In a lengthy but always absorbing quest, Miguel reconnects with the actor’s daughter; the film’s original editor; and a woman both he and the actor once loved. 

There’s padding though, and it’s filmic in-jokes. Knowing mentions of Dreyer’s miracles; Josef von Sternberg; a song from Rio Bravo performed gratingly off-pitch; the film editor looking at shelves of cans and lamenting digitization; and empty, disused cinemas, bio-boxes and abandoned projectors from an analogue past.

It's difficult placing this material in Erice’s narrative. Are we meant to presume Miguel’s - and Erice’s - careers as film directors failed due to changes in production methods? Or like the actor, did Erice walk away from his chosen career? Or are these questions just too literal?  

Many films have included film buff references. Tarantino can’t help himself and is constantly winking at his knowing audiences. In Kings of the Road (1976) Wim Wenders used the film references metaphorically and made Germany’s dying provincial cinemas stand for a dead German film industry.

Closer to home, in Dave Jones’s Yacketty Yack (1973) a film crew of film buffs and a film critic verbally interject with a deranged Godard-worshipping director. The film jokes are a self-referential part of a meta-text that includes, among others things, entropy, existentialism, misogyny, chaos theory, political correctness, cultural exploitation, academic tenure and violence.

In Close Your Eyes, despite the plot of a film director searching for his lost main actor, the film jokes seem like disruptive additions. 

They are not entirely honest, either. An important sequence from the unfinished film screened in an abandoned cinema is in pristine condition. Not a sign of dust, markings, or scratches after 20 years, with no splice marks suggesting a workprint, and with a very nicely mixed soundtrack.

Maybe Erice’s film does offer some parallels with the Spanish director’s 30-year absence, but as the film progresses any comparisons fall away. If Miguel had been a plumber instead of a film director, and the actor his lost brother, Close Your Eyes would still have the same power and emotional strength.

This compelling, near perfect work with its mesmerizing performances from all in the cast, didn’t need the in-jokes. 

Maybe it’s one of the reasons some have referred to Close Your Eyes as a “near masterpiece”.