Close Your Eyes

The latest film from Spanish auteur Víctor Erice - co-written with Michel Gaztambide - may have been more than three decades in waiting but it is brimful with ideas. While hingeing on a mystery mechanism that eventually proves satisfying in its own right, this is a meditation on both memory and movies as well as ageing and a hankering for the past that is informed by the melancholic knowledge that nostalgia is inevitably rose-tinted. Ideas of memory also inevitably evoke, as a background note, the Franco era and collective/selective forgetfulness, although this is a tale rooted in the personal rather than the political.

The “magic of the movies” is emphasised from the start as what we think will be the beginning of a tale of a man’s hunt for another elderly man’s daughter who is missing in Shanghai turns out to be a fragment of a film within this film. This is The Farewell Gaze, directed by Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), who, as we move to the leaden Spanish skies of 2012 is now sinking into a rumpled and baggy middle age. Garay’s film - which surely in a nod to Erice’s own struggles to get things made - was his second and last, never completed because the lead actor Julio Arenas (José Coronado) mysteriously vanished in the middle of the shoot.

Arenas was more than just the star of his film, but also a friend who Garay had known since their time in the Navy together. So when a TV crew gets in touch with him for a show about “unresolved cases” he agrees to help them. This is the start of a tale that is as much about Garay’s past as Arenas'. These are histories that Erice brings home at their most tactile through a succession of rediscovered objects, including a postcard sent to a child, a series of photo booth snaps and king chess piece.

“A person is more than just a memory”, one character notes and Erice emphasises the slippery nature of recollections as we see that things which people may cling on to as a link to their past may be much less significant than they think. Although there is a narrative here, the Spirit Of The Beehive director is more concerned with feelings, the sensation of lost companionship, remembered romance or a memory evoked by a snatch of a song or the sound of celluloid running through a projector.

Erice is in no hurry, luxuriating in his ideas and allowing his strong cast, including Ana Torrent as Arenas’ daughter Ana and Soledad Villamil as a former lover of both Garay and Arenas bring emotional texture to them. If there’s a shaggy dog quality to some of this it lends it a natural, everyday feel that consolidates our connection to the ideas. When we return to a bit more magic from the movies, Erice makes you feel that while happy endings may only be the stuff of fairy tales, hopefulness brings its own rewards.