2023-05-23 01:05:41
A big round of applause at the end. Mystery solved: it is Víctor Erice’s best film in forty years and he does not skip fifty (looking at the data of his filmography, the dates of his films, the risk of jumping will be seen) because it has just happened and it is still in progress. the temporal perimeter of its shock wave. He Halley’s comet from Spanish cinema, the Sallinger of celluloid, the spirit not of the beehive but of Guadiana, Víctor Erice, has made a major work, testamentary and an offering to cinema, to the one that has been made and to the one that has remained undone. To old cinema, even old, like ‘Close your eyes’, blessed and wonderful old cinema.
It begins there, inside the cinema, in a blend scene with José Coronado and Josep Maria Pou on a celluloid filmed long ago, and forgotten, and in a tone that is not Erice’s, but Miguel Garay’s, the unsuccessful leading director of this story. Several extraordinary duets follow, by Manolo Solo and Mario Pardo, by Manolo Solo and Ana Torrent, by Manolo Solo and Soledad Villamil… The plots of the film are already explained there, in that battery of duets, with disappearance, failure, the friendship, love, absence, song, oblivion, memory… All overflowing with ways of looking (the search for the gaze, the last one, is one of its dominant themes) and details and allusions to a world and a way of being gone forever; from the glimpse of Manolo Marinero’s book on the Cuesta de Moyano, to that incredible character who plays the brilliant Mario Pardo on the edge and his reels, posters and nest not to be born but to die.
The script with Michel Gaztambide, the photographs by Valentín Álvarez, the musical airs of Federico Jusid, each and every one of the performance notes, from María León to Petra Martínez, contribute to the sadness and the blunt tip of happiness of this film that he wants to live up to his creator and that, in many moments, passes over him. It has been mentioned before how much he has as an offering to the cinema, to the old man, and there is a sequence that forces the public to tame the feeling with applause, with Manolo Solo, surprising, gigantic, getting into the jail of ‘Río Bravo’ and leaving a version of ‘My rifle, my pony and me’ in their own way.
How much of Víctor Erice is suggested by this film and his story of frustration, flight, searches and oblivion; how much of him is there in those dialogues, atmosphere and sadness, and how much in that going to a magical denouement, a reflection of a movie screen and a shot so short, so short, that it literally takes you ahead. And, by the way, what a great actor José Coronado is, what an ability to say everything without text for it and what a character he gives Erice, but, above all, himself with a substantive and unadjective interpretation.
And we have not gone into the plot or its details here, although we have gone into the enormities it suggests and the effects it produces, and the satisfaction of feeling that cinema and Erice are the same thing. The fact that a film like ‘Close your eyes’ does not compete for the Palme d’Or is not understood, except for the circumstance that Ruben Östlund and Julia Ducournau, to put two members of the Jury, would not know where and what to watch of it , after all, old cinema. We must thank Erice for giving us this film, and also make him ugly for all the ones he hasn’t made and has taken from us.
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