That was, we learn, 1990; the film jumps to 2012, and its director, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo, whose deep-set eyes convey universes of worry and sadness) is approached by a Spanish TV series called Unresolved Cases — yes, the Unsolved Mysteries thing is worldwide — to talk about the film and his missing friend. He’s not sure about working with these people, but they seem to have integrity and offer him some money to use. The experience of Farewell Gaze has put him off directing — you can understand why that is — and, having written a novel or two, he’s barely scraping together a living as he enters old age. Research on behalf of the program takes him to some storage rooms and even to a completely different part of Spain (the film begins in Madrid). He consults his adult daughter (played by Ana Torrent, the little girl enchanted by the image of the Frankenstein monster in “Beehive”), an old friend, and his former film editor. Throughout his travels, the film maintains a quiet tone that becomes increasingly thoughtful as the story progresses. Some will probably dismiss this nearly three-hour film as “slow cinema,” and the description is accurate. But Erice’s deeply personal style is not tied to anything remotely resembling a trend.
The film’s central mystery is solved about two-thirds of the way through. It’s not at all paradoxical that the film becomes even more mysterious after that. Close Your Eyes is about seeing, and about recording what you see, and it’s also about what you can’t see even if you look. That is, a reintroduced character doesn’t tell the viewer anything concrete about what’s going on inside her, what she recognizes or doesn’t. We have an epistemological mystery here, one you might find in the film’s finale, in which the last ten minutes of “Farewell Gaze” are shown to an invited audience in the hope of eliciting something from one of the viewers. Or not.
For deliberately clever, self-referential reasons, the sense of cinema is never present in the film. Rather, it is closely tied to reflections on age and mortality. The quest of a now 84-year-old maestro of cinema is extraordinarily moving and speaks with an urgency that is not at all diminished by the film’s languid pace.
