Rating: NR | Runtime: 169 minutes
Release Date: September 29th, 2023 (Spain) / August 23rd, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Avalon / Film Movement
Director(s): Víctor Erice
Writer(s): Víctor Erice & Michel Gaztambide / Víctor Erice (story)

A person is more than just a memory.

The theories are many. Death by accident. Death by suicide. Scandal with an unknown woman. Or, as best friend and director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) likes to fantasize, Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado) simply decided to move on and find that place he’d never want to return from. While the latter might seem the most hopeful in the sense that it would mean the famed Spanish actor was still alive somewhere, it’s also probably the saddest. Because it means that the life he had wasn’t enough. That he would abandon his friends, daughter, and career in search of something they couldn’t provide. Yes, it would be romantic on some level because we’d assume never coming back after twenty years meant he found it, but at what cost?

One could say Miguel did the same. After Julio disappeared during production on Garay’s second feature, he never directed again. As he explains to television host Marta Soriano (Helena Miquel), the industry neither sought him out for another project after The Farewell Gaze fell apart nor did he attempt to force them. Instead, he stuck to writing, endured his own tragedy, and ultimately put Madrid behind him to retire to the coast and lead a simple life fishing. Was it a place that made it so he’d never want to return to his old self? Perhaps. It’s money that drags him back once Marta offers a tidy sum for an interview on her show’s latest episode about Julio’s unresolved life. Say a few words, provide the rights to the little footage that was shot of that last film, and give a final goodbye to his friend.

Well, Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes is a lot more than just that. The filmmaker’s first feature in more than three decades comes with a script (co-written with Michel Gaztambide) that takes its fair share of twists and turns. This is done formally in the sense that the first ten minutes we watch are actually from The Farewell Gaze without us knowing, but also narratively with the first half of the film serving as an excuse for Miguel to revisit his past before the second has him reconciling the fact that maybe the present is all that matters. Because, while in Madrid for Julio, what he gets is for himself: reminiscences with his old cinematographer Max (Mario Pardo), Julio’s daughter Ana (Ana Torrent), and an old flame in Lola (Soledad Villamil). While wonderful in the moment, it also begins to feel like the memories of someone else. That’s no longer Miguel.

It only makes sense that Julio might not be either. Maybe Miguel was correct as far as his friend walking away, but not about the motive. Because a social worker (María León’s Belén) who catches the episode Miguel was interviewed for is pretty sure the man they’re calling Julio is the handyman at the retirement home where she works. They call him Gardel after the tango composer/singer because he has no memory of who he is. Could it really be Julio? And what does it mean in context with his disappearance if it is? These are the questions that Miguel and Ana want to know for closure, but what if there’s another more important query to ask: Does it matter? Just like Miguel has no desire to go back to being the man he was, perhaps Gardel wouldn’t either. Is this person’s identity any less meaningful than the one he lost?

Erice sprinkles in many examples of the notion that humans evolve. They change, grow, adapt, and forget. Should Ana want to meet this Gardel if she’s already mourned her father? Should she speak with Marta to dredge up a past that she’s put behind her in order to move forward? What about Miguel reinventing himself or his friend by the sea adopting a nickname to replace his own? Or Lola moving to California to hit it big only to find herself returning to Buenos Aires to put down roots—is who she is now a product of those choices or is it a life created despite them? Add the idea of cinema and how the person on-screen isn’t the same person that people off-screen know and the lines between memory, identity, and image blur together. Nothing lasts forever.

So, we follow Miguel as he journeys through the many stages of his life via brief anecdotes, objects collecting dust in his storage unit, and his own mind working overtime to try and capture lightning in a bottle when it might be well past the moment for such a miracle to matter. If the images of his film and people from that time don’t have the power to move him away from his current self, why should finding Julio? Isn’t he just another fragment lost to the ether or sitting in a dark corner under boxes? The answer is yes and no. Yes, he is a remnant, but no, because he’s also a touchstone. The hope then is that Miguel might be a touchstone for him too. Maybe his presence will shake Gardel awake.

What good would that do, though? It might only cause more pain. So, rather than make this film about “saving” Julio, Erice makes it about Miguel waking up to the magic of his own artistic possibility through him. It’s about reconciling past and present, memory and reality. It’s about finding answers to help him move on as opposed to dwelling on what might have been. I love that showing Gardel his film isn’t about opening his eyes to who he was, but closing them so he might open them anew. This man’s fears of the girl he left behind might be real in the sense that he did leave one, but not in the way his new memory believes courtesy of a fiction he doesn’t have the ability to shake. Miguel and Ana have already grieved what they lost. Now Gardel can let it go too.

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Manolo Solo and Jose Coronado in CLOSE YOUR EYES; courtesy of Film Movement.