You can count on the thumb of one hand the number of directors who've spent fifty years making only very good or great films. Granted, those career stats have been juked to some degree by the fact the Spanish writer-director Victor Erice has made but four features in that period: 1973's The Spirit of the Beehive, 1983's El Sur, 1992's The Quince Tree Sun and now - after a long absence, mostly spent making shorts and documentaries - his latest opus Close Your Eyes. The downside of this altogether measured rate of productivity is that we have less of a sense of Brand Erice, in a way there probably is an identifiable Brand Almodóvar: to paraphrase certain music aficionados, here's a filmmaker for the true heads. Yet Erice's artisanal methodology has enabled him to work outside the corporate-commercial norms, at his own pace, on his own material, to his own standards, without feeling the pressure of hastening new material to Cannes every two years so as to keep himself in the cinephile eye. The upside is that Erice's features have always felt distinctive; they've never been beholden to passing industry trends. You will be struck by or reminded of this in the course of the new film's prologue, which is much unlike anything else you will see in a cinema in the year of our lord 2024. Unusually extended (a scene that runs fully fifteen minutes) and intriguingly stagey in its framing, it introduces us to a wealthy, eccentric recluse (Josep Maria Pou, who has a touch of the Michael Lonsdales about him) and the grizzled PI he's summoned to help determine the whereabouts of his estranged daughter. It could be a stock expository scene in a Warner Bros. programmer of 1947, the year the action is set, but the detail hooks you: the recluse's kowtowing Chinese manservant (Kao Chenmin), the admission that the missing girl is "the only person in the world who looks at me differently", the eventual revelation that what we've been watching is in fact a fragment of an unfinished 1970s film within the film - La mirada del adiós, or The Farewell Gaze - and that our own gaze has been directed towards the middle-aged actor playing the PI, one Julio Arenas, played by Jose Coronado.
What follows is indeed a movie about the movies, and actually not so unlike the movies Brand Almodóvar has been peddling in recent times - an investigation into/excavation of the past, albeit one where the colours and melodrama have been toned down. The bulk of Close Your Eyes unfolds around the Madrid of 2012, where we join the director of La mirada del adiós, Miguel (Manolo Solo), now greying and somehow even more haunted-seeming than the actors in that prologue, as he's recruited by the producers of a true-crime TV show looking into the disappearance of Julio Arenas shortly after shooting. The mystery is a complex one - too complex for the show, it transpires - which may explain why it takes the better part of three hours for Erice to resolve it. It involves, among other factors, the political situation within Franco's Spain, the desires, sins and failings of the flesh, and how creative careers fluctuate in ways beyond the artist's control. Physically, it involves the weary but curious Miguel touring various kinds of archives: cellars piled high with rusting film cans, second-hand book depositories, homes with histories, even the Museo del Prado, where we encounter Ana Torrent, The Spirit of the Beehive's now-middleaged child star, playing Julio's archivist daughter. It is as though Erice has determined to make a film entirely out of movie bric-a-brac: the people, the myths and legends, the old songs, the memorabilia, the physical material that refuses to be neatly digitised away, containing as it does countless hopes, dreams and regrets. The footage of La mirada del adiós Erice mocks up is a compelling artefact in its own right, because it communicates something about the ways pictures correspond to lived reality. But it also stands for all those films that were never made or completed, the plans God laughed at, the gaps in a director's filmography - the times life or fate or some other external force intervened.
If Close Your Eyes itself begins to resemble a private-eye movie, it's out of a recognition that life is like a private-eye movie: a gradual gathering of pertinent, sometimes sorrowful information, where there aren't always easy or clear answers to the questions you've been carrying around. The impression one takes away is that Erice, now 83, has been too busy living to trouble himself unduly with the artificial business of filming; it shows through here in some deep-to-profound pockets of human interest. In conversation over coffee in the Prado, Torrent briskly describes a humble, unstarry woman's life, but also - as she broaches the subject of her father - appears to revert to the child within. (The same Ana we've seen grow up on screen.) Erice's immense gift for casting looms out in the decision to centralise actors who have visibly had lives, and who respond instinctively to the way these characters are trying to settle accounts before their files are closed for good. In this context, the running time feels a supreme act of generosity on Erice's part: it gives those characters longer to work through their investigations, gives the film time to move away from the movies and back towards life as it is more commonly lived (and then back again), and gives us pause to realise how - and how movingly - that choreographed prologue connects with the subsequent drama. Though the film has a rumpled elegance and offers a particular masterclass in the art of the close-up - the camera studying the actors' features for what's been etched there - Close Your Eyes is less visually striking than Erice's earlier films, with their painterly, often expressionist plays of light and dark. This director really wants us to see the faces, places and objects that pique these people's memories. (And as in life, it's weird what sets you off: an Italia '90 sticker album Miguel fleetingly turns up on his travels took this viewer right back to a partially misspent youth.) It's typical of what is, in most respects, a straightahead narrative feature, rather more of its moment than its maker's ageless previous work. (Like I say, that audience who've matured alongside Almodóvar should be in raptures.) Yet the emotional shading is considerable in a film that's been built to last, and to argue for a form of cinema we may have been in danger of forgetting about: one both unforgettable and in itself a shared memory, a way of preserving all that which may yet slip away from us.
Close Your Eyes opens in selected cinemas and will be available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema from tomorrow.
