‘Close Your Eyes’ Review: The Case of the Unfinished Film

A mystery wends through “Close Your Eyes,” a drama in which the past, present and cinema converge. It’s the latest from the Spanish director Victor Erice, who’s best known for the art-cinema paragon “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), a dream of a movie about a girl who is deeply troubled by the original “Frankenstein” film. Set around 1940 in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, “Beehive” elliptically focuses on a traumatized child and country that, when Erice made this classic, was in the waning years of Franco’s fascist dictatorship.

“Close Your Eyes” is the fourth feature-length movie from Erice, who, it’s worth noting, was born in 1940; it’s also his first since “Dream of Light” (1992). The story in “Close Your Eyes” turns on Miguel (Manolo Solo), a melancholic filmmaker who hasn’t directed a movie in several decades and now scratches out a marginal living as a translator. Miguel’s last film, “The Farewell Gaze,” came to an aborted, ignoble finish when his lead actor, Julio (José Coronado), enigmatically disappeared. Without his star, Miguel was unable to finish the movie, which brought his film career to an end and, effectively, caused him to vanish as well.

The repressed have a way of returning, as it were. And so it is in “Close Your Eyes,” which follows Miguel as he confronts his old life, his unfinished film and his absent actor, all of whom come back to some kind of attenuated life courtesy of a TV program, “Unsolved Cases.” Miguel agrees to participate in the show, which will revisit his movie’s puzzling history. He sits down for an interview and lets the program present some of the few sequences that he managed to salvage; soon enough, he also tries to find out what happened to Julio, an inquiry that begins practically enough, though it gradually accrues destabilizing existential weight.

Written by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, “Close Your Eyes” quickly takes the shape of an investigation, one riddled with doubles, cinematic and otherwise. Much like Julio’s character in the unfinished film — a long, chatty section from it opens the movie — Miguel assumes the role of a detective who’s charged with finding a missing person and even begins wearing the trench coat that Julio wore in the film. These two former compatriots once shared an artistic calling and other interests, including an ex-lover. As the main story unfolds, Miguel’s exploration of the past reveals as much about the investigator as the investigated, and the men progressively seem like doppelgängers. Each has been lost; each will be also be found.

Erice extends this doubling motif to the intimate one-on-one conversations that anchor “Close My Eyes,” and which incrementally, and at times almost begrudgingly, propel Miguel’s story forward. Erice tends to shoot the conversations in the earlier part of the movie as face-to-face encounters, with Miguel — an earnest, worried-looking soul — seated directly opposite another equally serious character. Later in the movie, after Miguel meets a stranger called Gardel (also played by Coronado), who helps solve the case of the missing actor, Erice often frames the two men side-by-side, as if twinning them. This visual shift underscores their connections without commensurately deepening either character or the overall movie.