2023-05-23 22:38:32
In 1999, after three years working on the script, it was announced that Víctor Erice would not finally shoot his long-awaited adaptation of the haunting of shanghai Juan Marsé’s novel with a script that the writer himself —almost always against the adaptations of his works— praised his whole life. The producer, Andrés Vicente Gómez, canceled the shooting and would later carry out the project with Fernando Trueba directing and with a different script. Erice posted hers. History was repeating itself. If with The South The director could not shoot the script he had planned due to a cut in the days of filming, here his dream movie fell off shortly after starting. the shanghai promise as his version was called, would never see the light of day. It would remain in everyone’s memory as a cursed movie.
After that filming feint, Erice never managed to raise a fiction feature again. One of the great authors of Spanish cinema, the director of three masterpieces (The Spirit of the Beehive, The South and The Quince Sun) he would dedicate himself to fragments for collective films, short films and video art installations, but he would never go behind a camera again… Until now. The news caught everyone on the wrong foot. Last summer, public aid from Canal Sur revealed the mystery. Erice returned to the feature with a mysterious name project Close the eyes.
The mystery has been revealed at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film has been screened in the Cannes Premiere section and with the absence of Erice, who has once again shown his indomitable personality without appearing in the coming-out of the film. the first scene of Close the eyes comes like a slap to the viewer. A house on the outskirts of France. The 40s and two characters, Levy and Franch. One of them (José María Pou) asks another to go to Shanghai to bring her daughter back and shows a photo of her covering her face with a fan. No doubt. Erice is talking about the haunting of shanghai of the adaptation that was never filmed. He’s giving us clues as to what would have been.
The mechanism is soon revealed. What we have just seen is a movie within a movie. This scene is the last one shot by the character of José Coronado, the actor in said film, before disappearing without a trace. The director of that one, Manolo Solo, will attend a program like Who knows where to talk about his friend and show one of the only two scenes that remain from that movie that never was. A friendship with which he quickly reviews the history of Spain. Anti-Francoists, from Carabanchel, political prisoners, in the navy… and artists united by love and abruptly separated for decades.
In that transcript of the haunting of shanghai, the character of José María Pou asks Coronado to bring the girl back for a reason. Only she really looks at him. Only she can see how she really is before she dies. It is impossible to think that Erice did not want to look at us for the last time. Also that through his unique poetics, his sensitivity without boasting about him, he asks us to look at him for real. That movie is called the look of goodbyeand its title seems prescient.
From that first scene it is impossible not to see Manolo Solo and his Mikel Garay as if he were Víctor Erice. His sullen gaze, his introversion, his white hair. Manolo Solo is huge, and Erice captures the loneliness in his eyes in a unique way. Close the eyes It is, like all of Erice’s cinema, a cinema about memory. historical memory in The spirit of the hive y The South, and here the cinema as historical, individual and collective memory. The cinema as a revealer of the truth, as a builder of memories. As the only art capable of giving us back our memory, or at least rebuilding it when it has been stolen from us.
He succeeds, above all, with a final scene that takes place in a cinema. It’s not by chance. There is a clear dialogue between the first scene of The spirit of the hive and the last of Close the eyes. If that film opened with a village cinema full of children discovering Frankenstein and Erice focused on the fascinated eyes of all of them, especially Ana Torrent’s, Close the eyes ends up in a theater that looks a lot like that one. An abandoned town cinema where the protagonists will see the last scene of the cursed film to remember again. To rebuild your memory. It shows the open eyes again, but the last shot is for eyes that are closed. Behind them, the sound of a film reel projecting the last frame before fading to black.
We don’t know if Erice will make more films, but if this is the last scene she shoots, it would be beautiful and consistent with her brilliant career. He squares the circle and confirms that his cinema was always a cinema about the look, that of Ana Torrent, who illuminated Spanish cinema, and now that of Manolo Solo and José Coronado in this extension. It is no coincidence that Juan Margallo has a small role in this film, who played the maqui of The spirit of the hive, and it is no coincidence that he returns to Ana Torrent for a character called Ana and whom Erice looks at like no other. The director’s camera hypnotizes us again with Torrent’s eyes and with a scene, that “I’m Ana, I’m Ana”, which unites her indissolubly with The spirit of the hivewhich ended with the same phrase, said by the same actress, now 50 years later.
We don’t know if Erice will make more films, but if this is the last scene she shoots, it would be beautiful and consistent with her brilliant career.
It is not a round or perfect film, nor is it required. Not all interpretations are at the same level. The character’s return to Almería causes the group to slow down, but it is appreciated that Erice —in the script together with Michel Gaztambide— also remains aware of the political construction of the country —that nod to the king asking for forgiveness for hunting elephants in Botswana, those seas of plastic where workers survive—, that remains faithful to its naked poetics, its narrative transparency, emotion from simplicity, with those transitions with fades to blacks that are as simple as they are elegant. May he continue to be capable of constructing images of overwhelming beauty: crowned under a goal stopping a sun like an impossible soccer ball, two friends whitewashing a wall with the camera approaching them…
Close the eyes it is also a tribute to photochemical cinema. The one who is touched, the one who stains. The one that is saved and preserved. The one that has been everyone’s memory for more than a hundred years and the one that has built our memory, a memory more necessary than ever in times of platforms and algorithms.
Ovation without Erice
The film was received in the pass with a resounding and elongated ovation. The actors were excited. None of them had been able to see the film, which Erice has been working on until almost the last minute. There was an absence that everyone commented on, that of the director himself, who decided not to attend the coming-out of Close the eyes increasing his legend as an almost hermit filmmaker and far from the spotlight.
Huge ovation for the ‘Close your eyes’ team, the return of Víctor Erice 30 years later #Cannes2023 pic.twitter.com/o57W44sXeu
— elDiario.es Culture (@eldiarioCultura) May 22, 2023
Manolo Solo commented hours later, and still overwhelmed by the reception of the film, that they had tried to locate him to convey his warm welcome, but that, for the moment, it had been impossible. He acknowledges that when he saw that his character had “at least reflections of the director himself” he placed more responsibility on his work. “In addition, it is the first role in which I feel that I carry the weight of the entire film and on top of that with Víctor Erice, who is a myth, a legend of world cinematography, not just Spanish. In addition, making a kind of transcript or character with reflections of him. Well look [suspira de forma prolongada]the sigh that I have given now defines it very well, ”says the actor.
Victor and I only had to look at each other to understand what he was looking for and what he wanted. The relationship and the affection I felt was very beautiful
Ana Torrent
— Actress
In the script he already saw “a good movie”, but also certain moments “that could be in danger of being over-poetized”. “I’m also a person who abhors poetic underlining and then you see the movie and everything falls into place and it’s much more subtle,” he adds. The people who have worked with Erice point out that during the filming they often doubted whether everything would add up due to the few indications he gives. Solo also acknowledges that, as an actor, he was “because of his way of working, a little out of place, to put it in some way”, although now he feels “that the master plan has worked, seeing the film is like the roadmap had sense”.
Who already knows what it is to work with him is Ana Torrent. Her presence in this film is exciting and a way of “closing a circle”. “It has been something very important for my career, starting with Víctor and now also Close the eyes, which also talks about all that from Víctor’s point of view towards the cinema. There are some clear references to that discovery and those principles. To that look, to that cinema that is different now and that is no longer made. An exhibition of memory, feelings and tributes where The spirit of the hive It is very present”, says the actress.
Just like then, she has felt very protected. “I have also felt very loved, I have felt it as a declaration of affection and a gift that he has also given me. I have felt very good and with him very well, because also Víctor and I know each other, we have been seeing each other over the years. We only had to look at each other to understand what he was looking for and what he wanted, and the relationship and affection that I felt was very beautiful ”. A meeting 50 years later that sounds like a tribute, a closure and a farewell to one of the most important filmmakers in our history with only four films.
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