It’s been 40 years since the Spanish director Víctor Erice made a fiction feature, with just a handful of shorts and a documentary in between. His first two features were 1973’s The Spirit of the Beehive and 1983’s El Sur, and both are considered among the truly great movies in all of history.
But now, here, in 2024, Erice has made Close Your Eyes, and the only reason I won’t call it the best movie of the year is because that designation seems so painfully small for the work of such a titan.
This one follows Miguel, a man who, like Erice, directed just a couple of films a few decades back, although in this case his career came to a halt when the lead in his second film disappeared shortly before shooting wrapped, and the movie was never completed. Miguel is contacted by a television show that’s doing an episode on the missing actor, who was also Miguel’s longtime friend, and this sets Miguel digging back through his past and reconnecting with old friends, acquaintances, and lovers. The parallels to Erice’s own life aren’t hard to draw, as he’s had a number of projects that were never realized, and even El Sur, unimpeachable masterpiece that it is, was only part of what he’d originally intended.
But the movie is also so much deeper and richer than what even the most profound navel-gazer might produce, as Miguel’s journey pushes us to contemplate our lives and our connections to other people, the unavoidable reality of our own aging, and what our lives mean apart from our work and our art, and also because of it. Erice takes his time, he’s never in a hurry, and there are sequences here that are as good as anything you’ll ever see in your life, particularly the final one, which seems at first to be an homage to the magic of cinema, but unfolds into a meditation on memory and those things that trigger our emotionalmemories, if not our literal ones. Close Your Eyes is exactly what I’d hoped for, which is to say, it left me nearly speechless.
Close Your Eyes is on VOD December 3rd.
