FERMER LES YEUX (CLOSE YOUR EYES) © Manolo Pavón
Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes), the return of Victor Erice
Cerrar los ojos ((Close Your Eyes, Cannes Première) is his fourth feature film as a director, three decades after El Sol del Membrillo (Dream of Light), which won the Jury Award in 1992 and praised the gracefulness of Spanish painter Antonio Lopez. Victor Erice, the Spanish director known for El Espiritu de la Colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) (1973) andEl Sur (In Competition, 1983) creates a film that responds to a real personal “need.”
An investigation into the disappearance of an actor during the shooting of a film: such is the plot of this on-the-edge drama mixing fiction and reality. With Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes), Spanish director Victor Erice evokes two intimately related themes—identity and memory—through two friends, one an actor, the other a director. One has lost his memory, while the other tries to forget and then to remember.
Born from his imagination and a true life experience, as well as intimate questions linked to art and poetry, this conceptual story reaching into the director’s memory actually reveals two types of story: one that falls within the realm of legend, which depicts a life that is “not so faithful to reality”, but rather how “it ought to be,” and the other, a contemporary life “adrift without direction”, which evokes the uncertainty of our memory and the future.
To create the atmosphere and portray the characters of this classic-yet-modern film “suffused with reality,” the director surrounded himself with Spanish actors Manolo Solo (El Buen Patrόn (The Good Boss), 2021), José Coronado, and Anna Torrent (It Snows in Benidorm, 2020).
