Close Your Eyes
2023 · Víctor Erice
Years after his mysterious disappearance, Julio Arenas, a famous Spanish actor, is back in the news thanks to a television program.
dir. Víctor Erice · 2023
Víctor Erice has directed only four features in half a century, and each is treasured; The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) remains perhaps the greatest film of Franco-era Spain. Returning at eighty-two, thirty-one years after his last feature, he made this long, autumnal mystery about a retired filmmaker drawn back into the case of an actor — his friend — who vanished mid-production decades earlier, leaving behind two reels of an unfinished film. What begins as an investigation becomes a meditation on aging, friendship, and whether cinema can actually restore what time takes; Erice folds in his own unfinished business, casting Ana Torrent — the unforgettable child of Beehive — as the missing man's daughter, her face now carrying fifty years of film history. The unhurried rhythm is the point: conversations in kitchens and archives, songs sung among friends, all tilting toward a final movie-theater sequence of extraordinary quiet power. Snubbed by the Cannes competition, it promptly outshone most of the films that weren't. Erice has said every film is two films — the one shot, and the one the viewer completes.
Lines of influence
- The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) — Close Your Eyes recasts Ana Torrent and revives the Beehive conceit that an image is completed only in a spectator's gaze — the climactic cinema screening deliberately rhymes with the traveling projection of Frankenstein that hypnotized the child Ana.
- El Sur (1983) — Inherits the truncated, elliptical form of a film organized around an absent, searched-for man — El Sur was itself famously left unfinished, and Close Your Eyes builds its whole architecture from that poetics of the abandoned/incomplete work.
- The Quince Tree Sun (1992) — Carries over the patient, near-documentary observation of duration and the theme of an artwork defeated by time — the same unhurried rhythm of watching, waiting, and failing to finish.
- Frankenstein (1931) — Supplies the primal 'spectator-completion' image inherited via Beehive — the monster whose meaning is authored by the watching child — which Close Your Eyes reactivates when a face on screen is asked to restore a lost self.
- Cría Cuervos (1976) — Shares Ana Torrent as the living emblem of a haunted, unblinking child's gaze; Erice's craft debt is the deliberate casting of that same iconic face to carry Spanish cultural memory across fifty years.
- Vertigo (1958) — Lends the investigative structure of restaging a lost person to reawaken a buried identity — the search that hopes recognition can be manufactured by reconstructing the past face-to-face.
- 8½ (1963) — Establishes the blocked/retired director as subject — a film built around the very inability to complete a film — which Close Your Eyes literalizes through a filmmaker who quit the medium.
- Day for Night (1973) — Models the meta-cinema of a film about its own making and unmaking, using the abandoned shoot and lost footage as emotional material rather than mere reflexive gimmick.
- Wild Strawberries (1957) — Provides the aging-and-memory craft of an old man's reckoning journey, where revisiting fixed scenes from the past is staged as a formal device for confronting a life's incompletions.
- La Jetée (1962) — Grounds the film's faith that memory and love survive as a single remembered face/image; the craft debt is the reliance on a fixed frozen image to recover an identity dissolved by trauma.
- Close-Up (1990) — Extends the same craft of collapsing film and life so that cinema itself becomes the instrument that reconstitutes a fractured identity, staged with documentary patience.
- Tren de Sombras (1997) — The closest Spanish sibling: a wholly fictional 'lost' film reconstructed frame by frame, treating cinema as memory-machine and found footage as the medium of mourning — the exact terrain of Close Your Eyes's film-within-a-film.
- Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) — Shares the elegy for cinema-and-loss set in a dying movie house, where the film screened within mourns its own medium and unhurried duration becomes an act of farewell to spectatorship.
- I'm Going Home (2001) — Parallels the aging-performer and theatre-finale craft — an old actor's dignity and withdrawal staged through theatrical framing, foregrounding performance as a threshold to disappearance.
- The Other Side of the Wind (2018) — The archetype of the unfinished film about an unfinished film and a vanished director, sharing the reflexive melancholy of footage that outlives the project and the man who abandoned it.
- Certified Copy (2010) — Advances the device of role-playing and restaging to summon a real emotional recognition, testing whether a performed identity can become the authentic one — the wager underlying Close Your Eyes's final screening.