Cerrar los ojos

With all of the experimental and independent cinema around, it's a treat to discover a contemporary film with the distinct touch of a master. What makes a masterpiece? It's in the pacing, the framing and the discipline and patience to tell a story with depth. It's a combination that requires a degree of maturity and mastery of the craft, rarely acheived by new directors.

'Close Your Eyes' is an experience like contemplating the ocean waves as they meet the shore. It deals with themes of aging and memory and the realm where cinema encounters the world. It requires that we slow down and immerse ourselves in each moment as it unfolds, revealing each step in a journey about longing and a quest to discover who we are. It's a film about faces and places and encounters with others, taking us on a journey through time and spaces, where actual people live and breathe.

We live in an age of digital spectacles filled with flash and surprises that offer the adrenalized experience of watching long commercials. 'Close Your Eyes' demonstrates the power of film, in the hands of one of its masters, to bring us back to ourselves.

For someone who is over 80, Victor Erice provides, while very slow-burn story, a memorizing and symbolic story with beautiful camerawork, strong direction, great performances and emotional cores developed throughout. Erice previous works on "El Sur" and "The Spirit of the Beehive" are some of the best Spanish movies of all time as Erice is great with slow-burn cinema. Dream of Light was also pretty good and after many years, Erice still is able to conduct and interesting project.

Throughout, the run-time can be a big turn off but the narrative and themes that are explored within the setting were interesting as emotional and interesting themes were well-explored within the characters and setting as the themes were able to help create an emotional balance and vision of the setting. Many of the camerawork shots, sound designs and color presentation was pretty good. All of the performances are pretty great with good dialogue and realism portrayed throughout.

Erice's direction was perfect as his takes on the themes of memories and losses were handled well and the emotional core helped create a sense of dream-like and symbolic feel throughout. With the run-time being 169 minutes, I do feel that some aspects were dragged a bit too long and there were certain moments that made me test my patiences a little.

Overall, this is a movie that requires patience but it is very good to see Erice making another film and definitely something I would check out again for a second time.

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 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.

I really don't know what the point of this movie is. The story is soooooo very very very (did I say very already) very slow. I've read it got a 7 min standing ovation but I really don't see why. Probably out of respect for the director It's a movie about growing old and certain aspects of it but it doesn't really go deep. Basically it's just alot of talking without getting beneath the surface. Certainly the first hour is just difficult to get through. I almost gave it up but I stuck through. Not gladly must I add but it gets a little bit better. Dare I say it's the directors age that made this story at least an hour to long... closing off with something good. The acting was quite decent.