Close Your Eyes

Víctor Erice's Close Your Eyes premiered out of competition in the Cannes Premiere sidebar at the 76th Cannes Film Festival in May 2023, three full decades after his previous feature, The Quince Tree Sun (1992). It is only Erice's fourth feature in a career that stretches back to The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), and the long gap (he had spent the intervening years on essay films, shorts, and abandoned commissions) gave the new film an event-status arrival on the festival circuit. The Spanish-Argentine co-production was shot in 2021 by cinematographer Valentín Álvarez, in coastal Andalusia and around Madrid.

Manolo Solo plays Miguel Garay, opposite José Coronado as the missing actor Julio Arenas and Ana Torrent (the unforgettable child of The Spirit of the Beehive, fifty years on) as Julio's daughter. The 169-minute running time, a digital-and-celluloid blend of moods, and the late-period score by Federico Jusid all settle the film into a contemplative tempo Erice has called “the rhythm of remembering”. Several scenes openly cite Hawks, Ford and the post-war Spanish cinema of Erice's youth.

Spanish critics greeted the film as a major late-career statement; José Coronado won the Goya for Best Supporting Actor and the film picked up four further Goya nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. Cahiers du Cinéma, Sight & Sound and Film Comment placed it among their films of the year. It was widely read as Erice's reflection on what cinema can still hold of the people it loses, a coda that arrived without ceremony but with very wide acclaim.