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At the beginning of “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), Víctor Erice’s sublime first feature, a travelling projectionist arrives at a remote Castilian village, bearing a print of James Whale’s “Frankenstein.” It’s 1940, not long after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and the townsfolk, eager for entertainment, are soon transfixed by this sad, haunting tale of a man-made monster—none more so than Ana (Ana Torrent), a six-year-old girl with a solemn gaze and a steadfast belief that she is witnessing something terrifyingly real. And who, having experienced Whale’s classic themselves, could argue with her? Ana’s older sister, Isabel (Isabel Tellería), does try to allay her fears: “Everything in the movies is fake.” And yet, Isabel insists, with a twinkle of mischief, there is an actual monster in the village, a mysterious spirit with whom they can communicate at will. “Close your eyes,” she whispers, “and call him.”
Five decades later, “The Spirit of the Beehive” still ranks among the most auspicious of débuts and the greatest of Spanish films; released during the last years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, it established Erice as a leading voice in a national art cinema that was just beginning to reëmerge. It also made clear, right from the start, that cinema itself would be Erice’s grand obsession. Everything in the movies may be fake, as little Isabel says, but there is nothing phony about their power over us—a lesson that Ana learns at an early age. So does Estrella, the thoughtful young heroine of Erice’s second feature, “El Sur” (1983), whose life is forever changed after she spies her father walking alone into a cinema, chasing the spectre of his lost love. Erice’s own love of the movies has never been in doubt, even when the movies haven’t loved him back. “El Sur,” adapted from a novella by Adelaida García Morales, was both an exquisite work and an incomplete one; its final third was never filmed, reportedly for financial reasons, though Erice has disputed this. Since then, he has made a superb documentary, “The Quince Tree Sun” (1992); a 2007 nonfiction collaboration with the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami; and several shorts, but he has struggled to get another feature-length drama off the ground.
Until now: well into his eighties, Erice has made a quietly astonishing new movie, called “Close Your Eyes.” Beyond its stealthy callback to “The Spirit of the Beehive,” the title primes us for a kind of trance, as if we were not just watching a film but attending a séance—a gathering of the ghosts of cinema past. It begins, slyly, with scenes from a film-within-a-film, although this one, unlike “Frankenstein,” springs from Erice’s own imagination. It’s called “The Farewell Gaze,” and from what we see of it—a stately, gray-toned prologue, set at a French château in 1947—it appears to be a postwar adventure yarn, about a mission to recover a lost loved one. But the film, we learn, remained unfinished; it shut down production in 1990, not long after its lead actor, Julio Arenas (José Coronado), mysteriously disappeared. He was never found, and the director, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), a close friend of Julio’s, never made another picture. More than two decades later, Miguel dwells in a shack by the sea, catching fish and dreaming of what might have been.
One day, what might have been comes knocking. A Madrid-based TV journalist (Helena Miquel) is investigating Julio’s disappearance, and she wants to interview Miguel and air his unscreened footage. Miguel agrees to participate (he could use the money), and begins to conduct inquiries of his own. Early on, we meet his longtime editor, Max (Mario Pardo), who keeps a room stocked with film cannisters and grumbles things like “Miracles haven’t existed in the movies since Dreyer died.” Harder to track down is Lola (Soledad Villamil), an Argentinean singer who was once Miguel’s lover and Julio’s. In a scene that drolly quickens the story’s pulse, she and Miguel muse over how the actor might have met his untimely end—and Lola, tickled by Miguel’s grim control of narrative, cannot help but commend his inner film geek.
And then there is Julio’s daughter, Ana, who is reluctant to excavate her precious few memories of a man whose reputation as an actor—and as a “professional ladies’ man”—far eclipsed his conduct as a father. She speaks willingly to Miguel, though, and in her pain and confusion a hushed, gorgeous aria of abandonment emerges. It hits all the harder for being delivered by none other than Ana Torrent, who is now in her late fifties. She has a more peripheral role than in “The Spirit of the Beehive,” but her presence has lost none of its striking, becalmed gravity. To see her all these years later is its own kind of miracle—not something out of Dreyer, perhaps, but still a mighty vindication of cinema’s glories.
You could describe “Close Your Eyes” as the story of how a movie about a missing person spawns a show about a missing person, which is scarcely the least of the meta ironies that Erice and his co-writer, Michel Gaztambide, have dreamed up. Lonely images and ideas from the director’s first two features—a small box full of cherished possessions, a father’s long estrangement from his daughter—have a poignant tendency to resurface here, as though Erice, for all his formidable gifts, were powerless to tell anything but the same sad story. Indeed, it requires no leap of the imagination to view Miguel as Erice’s fictional stand-in, an artist whom time and cinema nearly forgot, now peering into the past and seeking to salvage something of his art. Nor is it a stretch to see, in “The Farewell Gaze,” the gloomy vestiges of Erice’s own compromised projects: “El Sur,” bien sûr, but also “The Shanghai Spell,” a wartime drama that Erice had planned to direct in the early two-thousands. (It was instead made by Fernando Trueba, in 2002.)
All this runs the risk of making Erice’s film sound unduly self-involved, though it isn’t any more so, really, than some of this season’s other epic comebacks from suddenly renascent filmmakers. Neither critics nor audiences had much use for “Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1,” the bloated first entry in a purportedly multi-film campaign to restore the big-screen Western—and, with it, the directing career of Kevin Costner—to a perch of artistic and commercial viability. I hope better fortunes await Francis Ford Coppola’s forthcoming “Megalopolis,” a self-financed, long-aborning passion project that is fuelled by a heroically foolhardy belief in the medium and its potential for self-renewal. “Close Your Eyes” has its own warm spirit of optimism but, happily, none of the self-regarding solipsism you might fear from such a personal valentine to cinema. I can imagine many a moviegoer entering the theatre knowing nothing of Erice and his work, and getting caught up in the gentle grip of his filmmaking. Miguel’s journey may sway to a leisurely, elegiac art-film beat, but that rhythm barely conceals the pulsing machinery of a detective story.
Any initial bursts of impatience will evaporate entirely midpoint: a magical seaside interlude, during which Miguel, unwinding in the company of a few beach-bum neighbors, picks up a guitar and strums his own version of “My Rifle, My Pony and Me.” Those who cherish Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” (1959) will no doubt sense the hovering spirits of Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson, and might even be tempted to join in as Miguel transforms the séance into a concert:
“Close Your Eyes” isn’t a Western, and the Spanish coast bears little resemblance to the American frontier, but from this captivating sequence onward it has us in the grip of a heartrending Hawksian spell—which is to say, a belief in the sustaining power of community. As Miguel continues to search for answers, he finds aid and solace from unexpected parties, including a sharp-eyed social worker (María León) and a few kindly nuns, whose presence confers on his mission a special kind of blessing. That mission, of course, runs parallel to Erice’s own—to discover if, more than half a century after his first feature, the movies still have a place for him.
That question manifests itself in his very images. The lovingly contrived footage from “The Farewell Gaze,” supposedly shot in 1990, has the richness and granularity we associate with celluloid; the rest of “Close Your Eyes,” by contrast, has a slick digital polish. In a sense, the challenge that Erice has set for himself is to reconcile these two visual modes, and to see if, in the harsh, flattening light of the present day, he can still recover the expressive delicacy and luminosity of his earlier work. A deeply satisfying answer arrives, at long last, in the only place it could—a dilapidated old movie theatre, where his characters find themselves in every sense, and where the meaning of the title finally snaps into focus. If you have ever loved a film so much that you had to turn away—as if you were in danger of experiencing too much of a good thing—perhaps you know its meaning already. Close your eyes, and succumb: it’s time for a moviegoer to dream. ♦
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