82-year-old Spanish director Víctor Erice had previously released a total of three feature films: his classic The Spirit of the Beehive in 1973, The South in 1983 and The Quince Tree Sun in 1992. Now here is Close Your Eyes, co-written by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, whose title could be taken to indicate a farewell. We can only hope not. It is a mysterious, digressive, long and baggily constructed film possessed of a distinctive richness and humanity, all about the balance between memory and forgetting which we all negotiate as we come to the end of our lives. And it is also about cinema, which helps to promote memory and retrieve that which has vanished, even as it is itself in danger of being forgotten. Close Your Eyes could even be a wry comment on Erice’s own absence these 30 years.
We begin in the grounds of a secluded, handsome villa in France just after the second world war, occupied by a wealthy recluse who calls himself the “Sad King”. He is played by Josep Maria Pou, wearing a toque (like Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame) and attended by a fancifully imagined Chinese manservant. He receives a visitor, played by José Coronado, a Spanish leftist and anti-Francoist to whom the Sad King feels gratitude for the way he helped him during the war (the Sad King is Jewish). He offers his visitor a lucrative job to track down his half-Chinese daughter who has vanished from his life.
