José Coronado in Close Your Eyes

CLOSE YOUR EYES
Directed by Victor Erice
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆

A PICTURE that relies on atmosphere as opposed to action, director Victor Erice, like this film, does not rush anything. This is his fourth feature in the past 51 years, suggesting he likes his art to gestate. This translates on to screen, with this story of a film director looking back at a defining incident is spread thinly across the running time.

But no matter: it’s rather lovely to look at, and one lingers in an art gallery – so no excuses not to sit a while and stew in the art Erice has created.

An intriguing story begins at a dusty and rundown chateau in the French countryside, two years after the end of the war. We meet a grand old man, decked out in a flowery gown and sporting a cap that suggests exotic travels, and learn he is a Jewish refugee from Franco who also escaped the Occupation.

He is joined by a visitor who he has asked to meet him for a job offer: will he head to China to track down his only daughter?

Suddenly the tone and texture changes: we are catapulted from an atmosphere of deep faded and dust-laden grandeur (shot on 16mm film) into a shiny white world (shot digitally).

We learn that the opening scene is part of a film that was never finished.

Director Miguel Garay (Manolo Soro) had cast best friend Julio Arenas (José Coronado) in the lead – but disaster struck as they shot a scene: the actor disappeared and his body was never recovered.

Short of cash, Miguel is helping a TV documentary crew revisit what happened to Julio and the request prompts him to start revisiting days he had left behind.

He meets his former editor Max (Mario Pardo), lying under a blanket on a sofa and surrounded by thousands of cans of film, and a singer Marta (Helena Miquel), who was his and Julio’s girlfriend. There is intrigue running throughout – how did Julio die? Was it an accident? Or did his tryst with the wife of a Francoist officer lead to his untimely demise?

Questions about memory, revisiting the past, hindsight and how an individual’s experience of any given time is filtered. Big topics to mull over, and hard to be conclusive about – but fair play to Erice for having created something so watchable and beautiful, while pondering on such chewy questions.