Cerrar los ojos

I was watching something on T. V. one day and came across a commercial starring Ryan Reynolds. I was struck by how OLD he looked in it. Not bad, just old, compared to the Ryan Reynolds who started his career on "Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place." Ryan is around my age; in fact, he might even be a little younger. I turned to my wife and asked, "God, do WE look that old?" The answer is probably "yes," but the difference is that my wife and I don't have constant reminders of what our younger selves looked like thrown in our faces every day. At the very same time that the Ryan Reynolds commercial was airing, "Blade: Trinity" was on a different station.

That experience got me thinking a lot about how movies and the actors in them capture moments in time and make possible a weird kind of time travel. You can watch Nicole Kidman in "Far and Away" and then immediately hop over to "Babygirl" and literally see the passage of years in her face.

This is just one of the ideas explored in "Close Your Eyes," an evocative slow burn of a movie about aging in general, and aging as an artist specifically. Manolo Solo is my pick for best actor of the year for his performance as Miguel Garay, a former movie director and author who is trying to track down his friend Julio Arenas, an actor who starred in one of Garay's films but disappeared without a trace before the film could be finished. The film turns into a kind of quiet detective story as Garay tracks Julio down through mutual acquaintances, clues left behind, etc. The film is as much about Garay's own psychology as it is about what happened to Julio. Actually, the film is about lots of things, but it's not obviously about any one thing. It's a lot about coming to terms with getting older and saying goodbye to things that you won't ever have again, something that resonates with me very much right now in my life, having just turned 50. But it's not a downer. It's as much about realizing how much there is to enjoy in the later part of life as there is to miss.

You've gotta have patience with this one, as it's slow and ruminative. It's like reading a character-driven novel. It also happens to be one of the best movies released in 2024.

Grade: A.

The title of the movie has to refer to what happens to you when you watch it. Jokes aside it's the first time I fall asleep in the cinema while watching a movie. The seats weren't tall enough so I couldn't rest my head and I was constantly falling asleep in the void and then instantly waking ip. That was going on for the last 45 minutes of the film. Has to be the slower movie I've ever watched. I was waiting for a climax or something to compensate me but it wasn't there. Nothing ever happened. Everything stays unanswered which is not bad by itself but in this case some answers would be the least.

We begin by watching a ten minute excerpt from a drama that shortly afterwards discover is just about all there is from the final film of acclaimed Spanish actor "Julio Arenas". He finished filming for the day then was never seen nor heard from again. Many years later, a television journalist "Soriano" (Helena Miquel) invites the film's director "Garay" (Manolo Solo) onto her missing persons television programme with a view to finding out just what happened to him. In best "Crimewatch" style, someone calls into the programme with a possible lead. Might they have found this man after all these years? On the face of it, the story is all a bit predictable. It's the quality of the acting and the writing that puts the meat on the bones, and both Solo and the Jose Coronoado as handyman "Gardel" deliver engagingly well. It is a slow burn of a film, with an emphasis split between the search for the actor and the search of "Garay" for some degree of closure so he can get on with his life rather listlessly spent reading, drinking, smoking and fishing with the fellow residents of his squat. Fans of "Rio Bravo" (1959) might recognise the song he sings with neighbours "Toni" (Dani Téllez) and his expectant wife, and those few moments of the film demonstrate nicely the emotions of friendship, emotion and loneliness director Victor Erice wants to convey for just about all of the principal characters. The conclusion in inconclusive, but it does make you pine a little for the days where even the smallest of towns had it's own cinema. I wonder if anyone should ever make the underpinning movie? This is worth watching.

I loved this film, the direction of the actors, the pacing and how natural it felt. I watched it over two nights - it's a long film but I was completely involved in the story. All of the characters contributed to the effectiveness of the film and added depth. Nothing felt shallow or forced. The central mystery made me want to watch to the end and discover what had happened to him all those years ago. It's a love letter to film making too and the power of film to affect us and stay in our memory, and how it can change our lives. I'm surprised to read the negative reviews. A brilliant ending, too.

This late work is the first I've seen by Spanish auteur Victor Erice. (Yes, fellow cineasts, I have reached the age of 48 without EVER watching "Spirit of the Beehive". I know this is deeply sinful and plan to rectify it by- not kidding- the end of the day on which I am writing this review!) From what I have read about Erice's earlier, major works his films usually concern childhood, and tend to be fairly short in duration- under 2 hours. Related to those earlier films, "Close Your Eyes" would seem to be a departure for the 84 year old writer-director. It is almost 3 hours long, and it is concerned with the theme and rhythms of old age.

"Pensive" and "patient" are the two adjectives I would use to describe the film's mood, at least for its first two acts. This is, indeed, a film in 3 acts, and not in the insipid sense meant by Hollywood scribes. The three sections of the narrative, each in a different setting with largely different supporting characters besides the lead, 70-something writer Miguel Garay- played, well, pensively and patiently by Manolo Solo, feel like three different films about the same character.

The cliche about old age is that one realizes how short life is, and even a middle-aged person can attest to a level of truth in this. Less discussed or described is the change in the moment to moment temporality as one gets older, the appreciation and savoring of moments that have come to seem more finite. Erice and his team convey that beautifully in the first two acts, particularly the second which basks in an understated contentedness that cannot last even in the sphere of lived time.

In the first act, two elderly friends discuss the "challenge of old age" and one character defines it as living "fearlessly and without hope". The final section of the film, the one with the closest thing to a conventional story-line, perhaps only lives up to the first half of the first act's declaration. It is filled with an elderly artist's final declaration of devotion to their medium- the cinema- in which the artist maintains a faith in an ability to attest, reveal, and perhaps even heal.

On a personal note, the cinema has been as close as I've had to a religious force in my very atheistic life. Perhaps when/ if I approach Erice's age I will feel a need for such declarations of devotion. As the almost 50 year old who watched "Close Your Eyes", however, I could have done without the metaphysics lesson.