Critics reviews

Slowly but deliberately paced, the movie builds to a crescendo in a closing act where a movie itself — a real movie shot and projected on celluloid — plays a pivotal role, resuscitating forgotten lives and memories as only the cinema can do. Erice has managed, at once slyly and poignantly, to justify his long absence from the scene in a film that’s all about absences, using a medium that many deem to be dying to quite literally bring back the dead.

It’s a beguiling drama that contrasts the mirage-like quality of hopes against the more tangible solidity of regrets. But while there’s a melancholy magic to it all, the spell is stretched rather thinly over the long running time.

“Close Your Eyes” is a sigh of resignation over film’s semi-forgotten value as an archival medium, and, as if to spite the gloomy flatness of its digital veneer, it embraces that part of its identity with a literalness endemic to Erice’s otherwise poetic work.

Erice’s “Close Your Eyes” is a bittersweet homage to how movies can bring us together and remind us of the past but never bring us back to the people we once were.

“Close Your Eyes” proves a disarmingly simple, emotionally direct film once its out-of-time aura settles. A story itself of disappearance and reemergence, and the potential of cinema to bridge past and present as if decades were days, it’s potent and poignant enough to reach newcomers to Erice’s work, even as fans pore over its self-reflexive details.

Close Your Eyes emerges as a work shockingly resistant to compartmentalization, appreciative both of cinema and its absence—all too fitting for a filmmaker whose career is as defined by the quality of his films as the long silences between them.

Fifty years ago, the venerable and venerated director Victor Erice made his debut, The Spirit of the Beehive, perhaps the greatest Spanish film in history. Close Your Eyes certainly feels like his way of bidding goodbye to the medium.

Fans of "Beehive" may be surprised at how ponderous "Close Your Eyes" is and how dark and muted it looks... But the slow burn, if perhaps not entirely warranted, leads to a finale that makes a strikingly serious case for the necessity of cinema. "Close Your Eyes" proposes that film is not just a means of preserving memory but also a way of sharpening it.

The unfussy elegance of Erice’s filmmaking remains as fresh and clear as ever. It’s a contemplative style, allowing his superb cast time and space, regularly fading to black between scenes... It’s a film, then, made by, and about, true believers in the transcendent potential of sound and image.

Close Your Eyes is a walking-pace voyage in search of the self and the Other, not so far in its overall thrust from Paris, Texas, down to its theme of amnesia and transformative final act. I

It is a mysterious, digressive, long and baggily constructed film possessed of a distinctive richness and humanity, all about the balance between memory and forgetting which we all negotiate as we come to the end of our lives. And it is also about cinema, which helps to promote memory and retrieve that which has vanished, even as it is itself in danger of being forgotten.

The film regains strength in the final hour as the twin themes of memory and identity come to the fore, and Erice brings the film full circle in a bold and surprisingly emotion-packed ending, which offers closure on the right notes of hope and love. So despite all the sophisticated use of meta-cinema and constant cross-references between fiction and reality, the ending is as moving as it is unexpected.