Open Your Eyes

Abre los ojos

France, Italy, Spain

1997

117 Min

Color

1.85:1

Spanish

Currently 3.6/5 Stars.
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PROD Fernando Bovaira, José Luis Cuerda

SCR Alejandro Amenábar, Mateo Gil

CAST Eduardo Noriega, Penélope Cruz, Chete Lera, Fele Martínez, Najwa Nimri, Gérard Barray, Jorge de Juan, Miguel Palenzuela, Miguel Ángel Fuentes, Joserra Cadiñanos, Tristán Ulloa

MUSIC Alejandro Amenábar, Mariano Marín

SOUND Daniel Goldstein, Ricardo Steinberg

Sundance (World Cinema), Berlinale (Panorama): C.I.C.A.E. Award - Honorable Mention, BAFICI

Synopsis

An imprisoned man hides his face behind a mask is telling his story, as a flashback, to a psychiatrist: his name is César, he is an orphan but he had inherited a fortune from his parents, and he used to live in a luxurious house of his his own. He was also very handsome and a renowned womanizer. His best friend, Pelayo, was jealous of César because he was not very successful with women. But one night, Pelayo showed up in one of César’s parties with a beautiful woman named Sofía. When César met her and talked to her for a while, he began to feel something he had never felt before: love. And, although she was supposed to be Pelayo’s girlfriend, he tried to woo her, spending that night at her home. But Nuria, with whom César had his last affair, was very jealous; she went to pick him up in her car the next morning, and committed suicide by crashing into a wall. César survived the crash, but his face was hideously disfigured, his handsome looks gone. Doctors said they couldn’t help him. He was very depressed and still in love with Sofía. One night he went out with her and Pelayo, and he felt that they were very uncomfortable with his presence. But the morning after, his luck seemed to change completely: Sofía came to him, saying that it was he whom she really loved, and the doctors called him and told him that, with a revolutionary new technique, they could rebuild his face, which they did. César was happier than ever, but that’s when the really strange and scary things started to happen…and César found out that the real nightmare had only just began for him. —IMDb

Director

Alejandro Amenábar

Raised in Spain after his Chile-based parents fled the country shortly before the 1973 right-wing coup d’état, Amenábar decided to be a filmmaker early on, heading to Madrid’s Complutense University to study cinema. Undeterred after his professors flunked him, Amenábar learned the craft firsthand on low-budget productions. Backed by a producer and star he met during his “apprenticeship,” Amenábar burst onto the Spanish film scene at the ripe old age of 23 as writer/director and composer with his first feature, Tesis (1996). A moody mystery involving a cinema graduate student and snuff films, Tesis was shown at the Berlin Film Festival and earned several Spanish Academy Awards. Amenábar then scored an even bigger hit with his next film, Open Your Eyes (1997). A complex psychological thriller about a womanizing egotist who is disfigured in an accident, Open Your Eyes became a blockbuster in Spain, bringing Amenábar his first international distribution and a Sundance Film Festival berth… read more

Raised in Spain after his Chile-based parents fled the country shortly before the 1973 right-wing coup d’état, Amenábar decided to be a filmmaker early on, heading to Madrid’s Complutense University to study cinema. Undeterred after his professors flunked him, Amenábar learned the craft firsthand on low-budget productions. Backed by a producer and star he met during his “apprenticeship,” Amenábar burst onto the Spanish film scene at the ripe old age of 23 as writer/director and composer with his first feature, Tesis (1996). A moody mystery involving a cinema graduate student and snuff films, Tesis was shown at the Berlin Film Festival and earned several Spanish Academy Awards. Amenábar then scored an even bigger hit with his next film, Open Your Eyes (1997). A complex psychological thriller about a womanizing egotist who is disfigured in an accident, Open Your Eyes became a blockbuster in Spain, bringing Amenábar his first international distribution and a Sundance Film Festival berth. Though Open Your Eyes didn’t become a U.S. hit, it did attract an influential fan in Tom Cruise, who subsequently co-starred with Open Your Eyes femme Penelope Cruz in Cameron Crowe’s Hollywood remake of the film, Vanilla Sky (2001).

After composing the scores for the Spanish drama The Butterfly (1999) and his Open Your Eyes collaborator Mateo Gil’s thriller Nobody Knows Anybody (1999), Amenábar made his first foray into Hollywood with The Others. Executively produced by Cruise and starring his then-wife Nicole Kidman as a 1940s British mother who may or may not be crazy, The Others introduced American audiences to Amenábar’s skill at evoking spine-tingling chills without resorting to gory shock techniques. Introducing an isolated mansion swathed in pea soup fog, inhabited by a tightly wound Kidman and her two light-allergic children, and plagued by things that go bump in the night, Amenábar then proceeds to turn the haunted house cliché on its cinematic ear. Earning kudos for Kidman’s performance and Amenábar’s restrained yet assured style and plot-twisting script, The Others became a late-summer sleeper success. On the heels of the success of The Others, and given Amenábar’s remarkable ability to elicit chills from an audience as so masterfully displayed in Abre Los Ojos, it would have been all to easy to have written the multi-talented filmmaker off as little more than a style minded Hitchcock wannabe. Where many fright-minded filmmakers would be sharpening their knives in hopes of topping their previous efforts, Amenábar instead opted to truly challenge both himself and his audience with The Sea Inside. An affectingly humanistic tale of life and the right to die, The Sea Inside starred Spanish mainstay Javier Bardem in the role of real-life euthanasia activist Ramon Sampedro. While it may not have been the kind of film that audiences expected from Amenábar, The Sea Inside proved such a moving cinematic experience that it was bestowed with the “Best Foreign Language Film” award at the 77th Annual Academy Awards in February of 2005.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:203751~T1)

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