Víctor Erice’s movie is quietly transcendent : NPR

José Coronado performs movie star Julio Arenas in Shut Your Eyes.

Movie Motion

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Movie Motion

The Spanish director Víctor Erice is certainly one of our most revered, but least prolific, European filmmakers. Over the previous 50 years or so, he’s directed simply 4 options, beginning together with his masterful debut, The Spirit of the Beehive.

That film was a haunting household drama set in 1940, in the course of the early days of the Franco dictatorship. It was additionally a passionate ode to cinema from a filmmaker who’s at all times cherished the films, even when the films haven’t cherished him again.

Erice had a tough time together with his 1983 movie El Sur, an attractive but truncated work that was launched in its unfinished type. Within the years since, Erice has directed a variety of tasks, together with the 1992 documentary The Quince Tree Solar and a number of other shorts.

However he has struggled to get one other fiction function off the bottom — till now. The arrival of Erice’s new film, Shut Your Eyes, can be welcome information even when it weren’t among the best issues I’ve seen this yr. Manolo Solo performs a long-retired director named Miguel, who stop the biz in 1990, after certainly one of his movies shut down manufacturing. The circumstances had been mysterious: His star, a good-looking actor named Julio Arenas, vanished with out rationalization and was presumed useless. Now, it’s 2012, and a Madrid-based TV journalist is investigating Julio’s disappearance.

After he’s interviewed, Miguel stays in Madrid and makes inquiries of his personal. Whereas Shut Your Eyes unfolds at a leisurely tempo over almost three hours, it has the pull of a well-crafted detective story. Miguel reaches out to previous mates and colleagues, like his longtime editor, Max, a hardcore cinephile who nonetheless has the never-screened footage from that halted manufacturing.

Miguel additionally will get again in contact with Julio’s daughter, who knew little about her father even earlier than he went lacking. She’s performed, exquisitely, by Ana Torrent, who was only a younger lady when she starred in The Spirit of the Beehive many years in the past. It’s an excellent full-circle second.

Miguel’s investigation doesn’t yield any instant solutions, and he returns, wistfully, to his residence on the Spanish coast. It’s right here that the motion briefly pauses and settles right into a merely magical interlude. One evening, whereas hanging out beneath the celebs, Miguel picks up a guitar and performs a duet together with his good friend Toni. You’ll acknowledge the music in case you’ve seen Howard Hawks’ 1959 western, Rio Bravo, which is certainly one of my very own favourite films.

Possibly it’s certainly one of Erice’s, too. Like Rio Bravo, Shut Your Eyes seems to be a narrative about neighborhood, about friendships solid beneath unlikely circumstances. Miguel’s mission to resolve the thriller of Julio’s disappearance turns into a gaggle effort, as previous and new mates come collectively to assist him.

You don’t must know Erice’s work to get swept up in Shut Your Eyes. However those that do know his work will discover the brand new movie an virtually unbearably shifting expertise. Erice is, in some ways, telling his personal story: Miguel may very well be his stand-in, simply as Miguel’s unfinished movie appears like a meta-commentary on a few of Erice’s personal deserted tasks. Miguel and his previous editor, Max, reminisce about earlier, higher occasions for the movie business and grouse in regards to the adjustments wrought by digital expertise.

However regardless of his characters’ pessimism, Erice continues to point out a hard-won religion within the films. He is aware of that they’ll transfer us in ways in which no different artwork type can. At one level, Erice ushers all his characters right into a dilapidated previous film theatre, which is the place Shut Your Eyes turns into not simply an attractive movie, however a quietly transcendent one. I don’t need to say an excessive amount of about what occurs, but it surely’s value discovering for your self, in a film theatre of your individual.