The Same Others: Close Your Eyes

The opening sequence of Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice, 2023) made me feel like I was immersed in a Jorge Luis Borges story. Although not technically the case, this is befitting for a Spanish-Argentinian co-production under the assured hand of one of cinema’s last living masters: Spanish director Víctor Erice. Close Your Eyes opens with an establishing shot of Chateau Triste le Roy, on the outskirts of 1947 Paris, followed by three shots that dissolve-on-axis to confront us with a bust of Janus, the two-faced Roman god who represents the transition from one state of being to another. The non-diegetic music reveals itself to be diegetic as the film cuts to the interior, where we meet Monsieur Levy (José María Pou) playing the piano. His personal assistant, Lin Yu (Kao Chenmin), draws the shutters and allows light to penetrate the darkness, forcing us to open our eyes and minds. Within this fixed tableau that hints at a proscenium, Lin Yu announces that Levy’s guest has arrived. In walks Monsieur Franch (José Coronado), and Levy utters a greeting that serves as the perfect metaphor for this film: “I thank God, Monsieur Franch, I have been permitted to see.” Erice is concerned with seeing as gaining insight, and cinema as a way of permanently fixing what we see in our collective memory. 

In his introduction to Borges’ Labyrinths, Selected Stories and Other Writings, editor-translator James Irby articulated four quintessentially Borgean themes: the double, travel through time, the story within the story, and the alteration of reality by the dream or work of fiction. All these elements are present in the opening sequence of Close Your Eyes and developed throughout the film. My point is not that Erice set out to emulate Borges, which he probably didn’t, but rather how we can sometimes find intriguing connections in the works of great artists. At its best, cinema is a process of continuity and renewal full of inevitable phantoms that reveal themselves as evocative precursors. Perhaps this is why Close Your Eyes references many other films, from the Lumière Brothers’ 1896 L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station) to Erice’s own 1992 documentary El sol del membrillo (Dream of Light), in which a painter revels in the creative process of a work that cannot ever be finished, a central theme of Close Your Eyes and the actual fate of Erice’s previous, unfinished feature film from 1983, El sur (The South).

Levy has summoned Franch to achieve a task that only the latter can do because he knows the value of ideals: Franch helped save many Jews from the Gestapo during the war, and at this point in his life, after the fall of the Spanish Republic and the onset of the nightmare of Francoism, Franch is tired of fighting and would like to lead an ordinary life. Franch’s mission is to go to Shanghai, find Levy’s long-lost daughter, and bring her back to Triste le Roy before cancer finishes his Sephardic-Jewish employer off. Levy hands Franch a photo of his daughter, Judith (Venecia Franco), now called Qiao Shu. The captivating effect of this image is doubled down when Levy tells Franch that he knows he has a daughter himself – by the feel of things, one whom he, too, has alienated. Franch is mesmerised: he looks at the image of Judith, and it looks back at him. His fate has been sealed; he accepts the job.

As Franch leaves Triste le Roy still contemplating the photo, a voiceover reveals to us that the scene between Levy and Franch was in fact a scene from Miguel Garay’s 1990 La mirada del adiós (The Farewell Gaze), a film that was never finished because the actor playing Franch, Julio Arenas, mysteriously disappeared during the shoot. We’ve travelled through time as different periods converge into the cinematic here-and-now: the 1947 scene at Triste le Roy was shot in 1990, and The Farewell Gaze is the Borgean story within the story of Close Your Eyes, filmed in 2023 and whose present time is 2012.

Just as Triste le Roy owes its name to Levy’s fascination with chess, the ending of Borges’ 1960 poem Chess could well be the epigraph for Close Your Eyes:

God moves the player and he, the piece.
What god behind God originates the scheme
Of dust and time and dream and agony?

In The Farewell Gaze, Levy is the god who moves Franch. At the same time, both Levy and Franch are moved by the god Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), the fictitious filmmaker behind The Farewell Gaze. At the heart of the next concentric circle is Víctor Erice, the film director who clearly identifies with his own creation and whose scheme of memory, nostalgia, creativity, and suffering in Close Your Eyes brings Miguel face-to-face with something he had lost: his belief in cinema – or in Borgean terms, the potential for the work of fiction to have a significant effect on reality.

Close Your Eyes features various compelling instances of the Borgean double: among others, Erice/Miguel; Ana/Qiao Shu; and grown-up Ana from Close Your Eyes/child Ana from El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, Víctor Erice, 1973), in both cases hauntingly played by Ana Torrent. But the same others who above all mirror the double-faced bust of Janus are Franch/Julio and Miguel/Julio.

Franch and Julio both have a daughter from whom they’re estranged – Julio for sure (Ana); Franch a safe bet. The photo of Qiao Shu has a strong impact on them. In the case of Franch, it is the tipping point that persuades him to accept the mission and go look for another man’s daughter in Shanghai. When Miguel finds his friend in 2012, Julio has lost his memory, doesn’t recognise Ana, and barely knows who he is. His sense of reality has hinged on two cinematic props years after his disappearance: the fictitious photo of Qiao Shu and the chess piece of a king that vaguely links him to Triste le Roy.

Franch and Julio also share a black hole in their lives. Due to Julio’s disappearance, only the two bookending sequences from The Farewell Gaze were filmed and edited. We’ll never know what happened to Franch in between because the footage doesn’t exist. Likewise, we only have slight hints of what might have happened to Julio between his involvement as an actor in The Farewell Gaze and the time Miguel finds him working in a retirement home on the coast 22 years later. Close Your Eyes shows Miguel imagining that Julio might have feigned his own death in order to drop out of society, but this says as much about Julio as it says about Miguel. Whatever led Julio to become the Borgean other – a mirror without a clear past or memories and with a questionable identity – remains an enigma that can only be healed by cinema.

The Borgean dynamic of the double also applies to Miguel/Julio, director/actor of The Farewell Gaze and close friends. Miguel in his own way has also dropped out of society. Like Julio he lives a secluded life in a village by the coast, tending his own Voltairean garden and translating books about cinema. He has no love interest and hasn’t tried to make another film after his unfinished The Farewell Gaze. In other words, Miguel is a shadow of who he once was until he regains his purpose in life through the quest for Julio. When Miguel finally sees Julio up close at the retirement home, what impresses him most is Julio’s stare: “He looked at me as if I was… no one.”

A few attempts follow on Miguel’s end to make Julio come back from where he has gone, but they all fail; from a photo of Miguel and Julio as sailors when they were young (“That’s not me, and this other guy isn’t you either,” says Julio, and he is not completely wrong) to, most poignantly, Julio not recognising his own daughter Ana when she visits him. “I’m Ana,” she tells him, as if she were in front of a vacant mirror. So she closes her eyes and says to herself again, “I’m Ana”. Even as I write this, the moment gives me a chill – not only for what it means in this story but also because Erice is self-quoting that beautiful moment 50 years prior, when in the last scene of The Spirit of the Beehive little Ana declares, “I’m Ana.” She does so twice as well, first to a Frankenstein who’s there but not there, embodying the horrors and humanity of the Spanish Civil War, and then to herself. She closes her eyes for an instant, and as she opens them again, she comes back from a place where her consciousness had gone. It’s an irreversible coming-of-age moment, resolved and serene.

Miguel’s gambit is that if Julio witnesses the last sequence of The Farewell Gaze, fiction might help reality resurface. At a private screening in a movie theatre, Julio sees himself as Franch returning to Triste le Roy with Qiao Shu. When Levy sees his long-lost daughter, he calls her Judith, and she asserts her identity by saying, “I am Qiao Shu” (ie: I’m Ana). Levy can only reply by playing the piano piece from the beginning of the movie, one Qiao Shu remembers from her childhood. Ana turns to look at Julio as he sees his double, Franch, on the screen with the Chinese girl from the photo. Our empathy for Ana is now beyond limits.

Cinema has an uncanny way of conveying realism in the way that it captures the way people move, their voices, and even how they feel. It’s the closest we come to objective immortality. Dead people live again when a movie plays, and the dead bring others to life. In that spirit, Julio witnesses how Qiao Shu cries in pain when her father, Levy, dies. The moment she becomes an orphan, Qiao Shu turns to Franch for comfort. He kneels by her side and tenderly embraces her. Franch and Qiao Shu break the fourth wall, but they’re not looking at us. They are quietly pleading with Julio. Miguel feels this and turns towards Julio, who is as enraptured with the movie as little Ana was in The Spirit of the Beehive with James Whale’s 1931 film in the lead-up to Frankenstein tragically drowning the girl who had asserted “I’m María”. Miguel looks back at the screen. Now Franch and Qiao Shu, his creations, are staring at him. Miguel averts their gaze and there’s a dawning of awareness – perhaps the answer to the question posed by Close Your Eyes as to why the artist decides one day that his masterpiece is not a movie but rather his life. Miguel/Erice have accomplished the synthesis of both. In helping Julio come back through his film, Miguel’s life once again has meaning.

I was moved to the core by the ending of Close Your Eyes. The last shot is a match cut from Miguel to his double, Julio, who closes his eyes in complete self-awareness. The power of cinema achieves what nothing else could: Julio has realised that his double on the screen, Franch, is himself. He understands at some level his connection with the photo of Qiao Shu, incarnated in his daughter Ana, who is sitting next to him; and he feels gratitude for what his friend Miguel has done for him. In doing this good deed, Miguel’s life has indeed been restored like Levy promised. He has regained what he had and lost: his belief in cinema, its capacity to transcend reality and bring out the best in us so that we can put into effect a certain measure of integrity in this world, flawed as it may be. Julio closes his eyes because it’s time to look inward and see with new eyes.

Cerrar los ojos/Close Your Eyes (2023 Spain/Argentina 169 mins)

Prod Co: La Mirada del Adiós AIE/Tandem Films/Nautilus Films/Pecado Films/Pampa Filmsf Prod: Cristina Zumárraga, Pablo E. Bossi, Víctor Erice, Jose Alba, Odile Antonio-Baez, Pol Bossi, Maximiliano Lasansky Dir: Víctor Erice Scr: Víctor Erice, Michel Gaztambide Phot: Valentín Álvarez Ed: Ascen Marchena Art Dir: Curru Garabal Cos Des: Helena Sanchis

Cast: Manolo Solo, José Coronado, Ana Torrent, María León, Petra Martínez, Soledad Villamil, Antonio Dechent, Mario Pardo, Helena Miquel, José María Pou, Juan Margallo, Venecia Franco