Close Your Eyes meditates on connections to the past with captivating lived-in anguish

Victor Erice's 1973 masterpiece The Spirit of the Beehive hinges on a young girl, Ana (Ana Torrent), in 1940 becoming enamored with the movie Frankenstein. Even after Ana's sister informs her that the movie is fictional, the experiences and torment of Frankenstein's creation compel her imagination. In the middle of post-Spanish Civil War chaos and an imperfect home life, Ana finds comfort in a monster that doesn’t exist. The Beehive screenplay from Erica and Ángel Fernández Santos explores the catharsis nestled within cinematic images. Within fiction, we can process daunting facets of reality and ourselves.

Erice's return to feature-length narrative films after a 40-year absence, Close Your Eyes, explores similar material though through an elderly lens rather than an adolescent one. Erice's script (written with Michel Gaztambide) begins in 2012, 20 years after a former heartthrob actor named Julio Arenas (José Coronado) vanished without a trace. His disappearance ensured that his final movie, The Farewell Gaze, would remain uncompleted. It's just one of many forms of emotional incompleteness Gaze director and long-time Arenas friend Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) has lived with for decades. Now nearing his 70s, he’s resigned himself to never knowing what truly happened to a man who defined so much of his life.

At the dawn of the 2010s, Garay and other folks close to Arenas are conscripted for a TV show chronicling this performer’s disappearance. This delving into the past coincides with Miguel's constant brushes with the past, whether it's his recurring hangouts with editor pal Max (Mario Pardo), a brief lunch with Arenas’ daughter Ana (Ana Torrent), or reuniting with former lover Lola (Soledad Villamil). Such encounters take a quietly heavy emotional toll on a man content to live in his quiet seaside shack with his journals, dog, and fisherman responsibilities. However, no matter how draining it is to consider yesteryear matters, our past never leaves us. Just look at how Garay and his former comrades still speculate over what happened to Arenas.

How do you remember the past? Memories in our heads aren’t enough. Human beings, whether by accident or intention, tend to accumulate physical reminders of events that shape us. Trinkets from vacations. Scars from fatal injuries. A Polaroid of a memorable date. These are the tangible ways the past carries into the present. As I type this review, reminders of the past surround my writing space. Movie posters of my favorite films, photographs of beloved times spent with friends, and a gigantic selfie of a beloved uncle who has now passed on. These are all relics of yesterday I can hold and touch today.

Victor Elice’s Close Your Eyes constantly emphasizes the importance of such tokens. Throughout the runtime, Garay and other characters run their fingers over seemingly disposable entities infused with so much wistful power. What could look like junk to another person’s eyes is a vivid reminder of the past to these individuals. An especially moving example is a moment in Max’s apartment where Garay encounters a caricatured portrait of his heretofore unmentioned son. Garay expresses shock that Max still has this goofy image. Max responds that he’s kept that portrait since he associates it so closely with the last time he talked to Garay’s son before he perished in a motorcycle accident.

Before tonight, Garay didn’t know Max possessed this caricatured doodle. However, this is not the first time these two men have talked about this deceased son. There’s a lived-in woe to every word Max and Garay deliver in this sequence. They’re used to talking about this buoyant soul in the past tense. However, that doesn’t make such discussions any easier to carry out. The intricate emotional details of these exchanges make it so deeply moving to learn about the handful of knick-knacks Max keeps (like a pair of motorcycle gloves) to remember this deceased man. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. In this case, one man’s trash is another man’s single thread connecting him to souls gone too soon.

Caked-in anguish within old postcards and caricatured portraits in Close Your Eyes also permeates the feature’s compellingly melancholy conversations. Erice’s feature functions on many levels, but it’s also a tale of people existing in circumstances they can’t control. Nobody is shocked over Arenas going missing. Similarly, Grayas, Max, Ana, and other characters cannot stop time’s ceaseless march. They will all grow old whether they want to or not. Even Ana quietly capitulating to a tedious museum tour guide job is an extension of this theme. She must put food on the table and provide for her child. The demands of capitalism are beyond her hands.

Close Your Eyes chronicles an array of powerless human beings conscious of their plight. Even “solutions” presented to these woes don’t exactly instill much comfort. Max’s advice in approaching aging, for instance, boils down to accepting this matter “without fear or hope.” Rendering their navigation of capitalism, aging, and unresolved emotional trauma in such understated terms just makes their turmoil extra compelling. Grayas and company do not even have the energy to scream anymore at reality's uncontrollable brutalities. They can only sit and try to be there for one another.

Because of this emphasis on larger struggles that cannot be solved or cured, decades of emotional resignment inform everyone’s facial expressions, line deliveries, and gestures in Close Your Eyes. Solo especially does fantastic work capturing deeply bottled-up pain just in Grayas’ eyes. Just because he’s lived with this emotional torment for decades doesn’t mean it’s dissipated. Solo communicates that reality in such fascinatingly realistic terms. Other performers like Pardo, Torrent, and Villamil handle their individual roles with similar levels of detail and tangibility. Such finely tuned performances render the dialogue-heavy nature of Close Your Eyes as a masterful virtue, not a shortcoming.

This haunting atmosphere's nicely compounded through details like Federico Jusid's score often vanishing for lengthy conversation scenes. The absence of Jusid's compositions really lets the untreated pain between these people simmer in the air. There’s a jaggedness to these people navigating their unspoken feelings that pronounced orchestral music cues would undermine. A reserved quality also informs Erice's and cinematographer Valentín Álvarez's visual scheme.

Their camerawork is subtle enough to let the performances and dialogue take center stage. However, the blocking can hit you in the gut with deeply moving images when the occasion calls for it. Just look at a wide shot of Grayas leaving his home for a new quest and, after he leaves the frame, his loyal dog walks over to the gate and begins barking for his master. It’s a heartbreaking image once again reflecting a living being at the mercy of a situation they cannot control.

Close Your Eyes quietly captures a chaotic and terrifying world we can never hope to fully understand or control. How do we find peace in the middle of all this turmoil? Sometimes, all we can do is cling to objects or art from the past to make the present bearable. Just ask Ana from The Spirit of the Beehive and her obsession with Frankenstein. A single doll, for instance, connects Ana to her father in Close Your Eyes. Granted, Ana openly admits some underpaid assistant almost certainly bought the Christmas gift rather than her dad. Still, it’s one thing she can turn to that suggests, yes, her father existed beyond the movies he starred in.

A photo of himself and Arenas as young sailors, meanwhile, gives Grayas some fleeting emotional solace. A supporting Close Your Eyes character also finds tying knots a soothing exercise that brings emotional closure he can’t fully comprehend. Then, of course, there’s the world of movies. Max isn’t just an editor, he’s also an archivist preserving reels of films. The world has moved on from celluloid, and corporations have dictated digital is the future. Yet Max clings to these vestiges of the past so that they do not vanish forever. On these reels are lives, costumes, creative ambitions, and so much more that could’ve otherwise ceased to exist forever. It'd be like they were never on camera or lived in the first place. Now, in the face of all the world’s uncertainty and uncontrollable chaos, they can endure.

The two shot sequences from The Farewell Gaze even allow Julio Arenas to exist again. He’s no longer missing. He’s there in these dailies or in other trinkets clutched tightly by his loved ones. Close Your Eyes lets audiences appreciate objects making life bearable or the past tangible through tremendously powerful filmmaking and performances. Submerge yourself into a darkened auditorium and experience another cinematic triumph from the man behind The Spirit of the Beehive.