82-year-old Spanish director Víctor Erice had beforehand launched a complete of three function movies: his basic The Spirit of the Beehive in 1973, The South in 1983 and The Quince Tree Solar in 1992. Now right here is Shut Your Eyes, co-written by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, whose title might be taken to point a farewell. We will solely hope not. It’s a mysterious, digressive, lengthy and baggily constructed movie possessed of a particular richness and humanity, all in regards to the steadiness between reminiscence and forgetting which all of us negotiate as we come to the tip of our lives. And it’s also about cinema, which helps to advertise reminiscence and retrieve that which has vanished, at the same time as it’s itself in peril of being forgotten. Shut Your Eyes might even be a wry touch upon Erice’s personal absence these 30 years.
We start within the grounds of a secluded, good-looking villa in France simply after the second world conflict, occupied by a rich recluse who calls himself the “Unhappy King”. He’s performed by Josep Maria Pou, carrying a toque (like Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame) and attended by a fancifully imagined Chinese language manservant. He receives a customer, performed by José Coronado, a Spanish leftist and anti-Francoist to whom the Unhappy King feels gratitude for the best way he helped him through the conflict (the Unhappy King is Jewish). He affords his customer a profitable job to trace down his half-Chinese language daughter who has vanished from his life.
However now we get away of this case to be informed that it’s a film whose manufacturing needed to be deserted within the early 90s as a result of the actor Julio Arenas, enjoying the Unhappy King’s customer, vanished through the shoot and has by no means been discovered. The movie’s director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) – who, maybe like Erice, has not been too busy within the business – is contacted about Arenas by a sensationalist TV present which investigates “chilly case” mysteries. Garay does a few of his personal digging into the previous; he talks to Arenas’s daughter Ana (Ana Torrent), the film’s editor and archivist Max (an attractive efficiency from Mario Pardo), and a mutual pal and lover Lola (Soledad Villamil). The key of Julio’s disappearance is (partly) revealed, and by displaying unseen reels of the unfinished movie, a form of denouement is contrived. By topping and tailing his movie with fragments of this different imaginary movie, Erice achieves a form of enigmatic structural coup: an emotional sense that issues have in some sense been defined and the case closed, when actually after all it hasn’t.
Shut Your Eyes meanders and twists and turns, it’s expansive, garrulous and but additionally downbeat and pessimistic. And sure, maybe Erice is having a bleak autofictional joke about “fixing” the thriller of his personal disappearance. Maybe, like Terrence Malick, Erice is about to present us a late-career burst of exercise, mixed with Manoel de Oliveira’s longevity. There’s something deeply civilised and mild about this movie.
