CLOSE YOUR EYES turns on a famous Spanish actor, Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado), who disappears while filming a movie. Although his body is never found, the police conclude that he has suffered an accident at a cliff by the sea. Many years later, the mystery is brought up once more by a TV program that tries to evoke the actor — offering as a scoop images of the last scenes in which he participated, shot by his close friend, director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo). Some 50 years after SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE — whose lead actress/child protagonist Ana Torrent makes a return here as Julio’s daughter — director/co-writer Víctor Erice turns in another masterpiece, thus ending a long gap between films with a haunting meditation on memory, absence and the enduring resonance of the moving image.
“A consummate work of filmmaking by a major artist… Erice has always used movies within movies as a storytelling device, but here that device becomes his film’s veritable raison d’être.” —Jordan Mintzer, Hollywood Reporter “Before this year’s Cannes, the Spanish director Víctor Erice had made only three features in a 50-plus-year career. These happen to be three of the greatest films ever made… Erice’s fourth feature is a stirring tale about memory, identity, and friendship, and it feels deeply, almost alarmingly personal.” —Bilge Ebiri, Vulture “A shimmery, nourishing culmination of ideas and ellipses in a career so elusive as to have taken on a mythic quality… In Erice’s aching, consummate return, cinema is life, but there’s life beyond it too.” —Guy Lodge, Variety
