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The close-up of Andrei Tarkovsky's first film shows a boy standing next to a growing sapling. In the shot that closes all his work we see another child lying at the foot of another tree, or perhaps it is the same, already dead. It is not clear that Victor Erice had these two images in mind when he thought of Close Your Eyes, the film recently released at Cannes after 30 years of silence and whose presentation in a radiant room Debussy did not appear. Yes, the actors excited and happy with their seven minutes of standing ovation. There are reasons for the absence, but perhaps it is not the time. As in the case of the Russian director, Erice's entire cinema now finally seems circular and perfect. The shot of the eyes completely open and surprised of the girl Ana when she discovers the face of the monster on the screen in The Spirit of the Beehive receives now, half a century later, its replica in the eyes of a broken José Coronado that close.

Let's say that this would be the first of the circles that are completed in a narrative composed of pieces of shared memory, all of them arranged in a kind of chaos fiction as if it were a puzzle. The spectator is invited to a ceremony rather than to a simple film. George Perec, the best lover of puzzles, said that the puzzle is a fiction of totality, an artifact whose meaning is to reassure us, to lock us in an order. But he also warned that the puzzle, in its radicality, is a trap: it shows us an ordered image, an apparent unity, behind which chaos, multiplicity, infinity of options is hidden. And it is there, in a constant appeal to fiction as a balm that organizes and orders the disorder of reality, where the mesmeric prodigy dwells, let's say so, of Closing your eyes.

It tells the story of a film director (sober and clear Manolo Solo) who long ago left a film unfinished because of an actor (huge José Coronado) who, suddenly, disappeared. And forever. All this happened in a strange past, that of youth, in the almost sacred space in which everything seemed once possible. Decades later, the mystery returns in all its raw vulgarity when a television program decides to investigate what happened, why and how. What is elucidated are matters such as memory, identity and time itself.

A moment of the filming of 'Close your eyes', by Víctor Erice.MUNDO

Closing your eyes starts with a fragment of that unfinished film that due to its texture and manners could well be a wreck of the adaptation of The Haunting of Shanghai by Juan Marsé that ended in shipwreck when the producer tore the project from the hands of Erice himself at the end of the 90s. And there, in the projection of the film within the film, in the cinema that devours cinema, the first seed of the first mirror is planted. Everything is reflected in everything. Life in the cinema, fabulation in the flint of the real, the past in the present. At one point, the daughter of the disappeared to whom she gives life not by chance in an imperial way and very close to the chill Ana Torrent says "I am Ana, I am Ana..." And the fragments of the shared image of time, of the spirit of that hive, acquire the flash of the ineffable. It is cinema turned into everyone's dream, into a common imaginary, into the abyss of the unsaid, of the unspeakable. It sounds tremendous, and it is.

Erice makes each shot breathe with an unusual parsimony, of old cinema, of cinema that breathes cinema. The images are there to invite doubt, fear, risk; to be composed, decomposed and reassembled while each spectator weaves the pieces of their own memory, of their particular puzzle. From its deepest intention, Closing our eyes wants to be an invitation to delve into what makes us what we are, which is nothing more than time. But it is also worth adding the social and even political intention to review everything that was badly cured in that time of our Transition – from horror to a complete country – too perhaps condescending to oblivion.

The film within the film makes a reference to the already mythical estate of Triste-le-Roy. There, in a decadent mansion, lives the man (José María Pou) who cries for his daughter too, like the protagonist, disappeared. Mirror on mirror. Triste-le-Roy was where Borges placed the research of his story Death and the Compass. In it, a man strove to establish the commonalities of a series of supposedly disparate crimes alien to each other. Finally he ended up finding the solution to his mystery, and with it, the name of the one who would be, in effect, his murderer. Right there, in Triste-le-Roy, in the place of death. Mirror on mirror.

The wait of three decades has resulted in a film that is made and undone in each shot, that hides what it leaves in sight, that retraces the paths of reality from fiction; a film that matches the foreground with the last. Erice says that the image of Ana in front of the screen in The Spirit of the Hive is worth an entire filmography; that it is impossible to put the miracle of life into a script. Some eyes that open and others that close. From any point of view, Close Your Eyes is already a memorable film. It is cinema and it is memory, everyone's memory.

  • cinema
  • Films
  • Cannes Film Festival

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