Cinema Releases - Close Your Eyes

BFI LFF premiere:  14 Oct, 9:45 - 22:24, Curzon Mayfair (Q&A before the film)
15 Oct , 9:45 - 22:24, NFT3

'It was at this point, during this nearly three-hour film’s drift between the plottier first third and the burgeoning catharsis of the final third, that I realized I was hooked and would follow Miguel anywhere. It had also become clear by then that Erice, now in his eighties, had forgone any attempt to revive the painterly splendor and crypto-minimalist narratives of his early films, and, working with co-scenarist Michel Gaztambide, had instead embraced a seductively meandering, novelistic approach to cinematic storytelling entirely new to his oeuvre. Close Your Eyes is a heartfelt homage to cinema’s singular relationship to memory, but it is also Erice’s most literary film: if Miguel’s The Farewell Gaze seems to resemble a Jorge Luis Borges story, the framing film, with its emphasis on disappearances, stories within stories, and amnesia, echoes the novels of Paul Auster…

Most poignantly, Close Your Eyes ends where The Spirit of the Beehive begins, with a cinema screen becoming not only a mnemonic device, but also a site of psychic transformation.'
Jose Teodoro, Film Comment

"A great director retuns after 31 years..Víctor Erice has made only three features in a 50-plus-year career.  These happen to be three of the greatest films ever made.
A stirring tale about memory, identity, and friendship, it feels deeply, almost alarmingly personal. The film proceeds in stylistically distinct movements...tantalizing images...
Close Your Eyes is about cinema, too, though not in the way that we've become used to in recent years: it's not a love letter or a poison-pen missive, but rather an exploration of cinema as memory and of the relative vallue of that memory."
Bilge Ebiri, Vulture magazine

★★★★★
"A touching and methodical exploration of memory, longing and cinema. There aren't many directors who have such delicate control and grasp on the craft, with only three feature films that are all classics.
A powerful movie that makes us reflect on our lives and the essence of memory.  There's a mixture of optimism and foreboding for the future...in this beautiful picture.
...reflects on various topics, ranging from art and the love of the craft to the intertwining between love and loss. Miguel and company look back at their relevance in this world through a big screen...it is art and cinema that pick them back up. Most of us have felt such feelings and relied on cinema to brighten up our gray-coloured days."
Hector A. Gonzalez, Loud and Clear


'A slow-burn marvel which climaxes in a sequence of overhelming profundity and mystery. What begins as an apparantly modest, small-scale drama, ends in a moment of ethereal beauty, for both characters and viewers. Erice still has the courage and the conviction to stage a miracle similar to the one which still set jaws-dropping in (Carl Dreyer's) 1956's Ordet. Only this time, it's not evanescent forces of spiritual fervour that are able to bring a man back to life - its cinema.'
David Jenkins, Little White Lies

"An Aching Ode to Film, Time and Memory...This exquisite, unhurried exercise in melancholy will mean most to existing fans of the Spanish master, but it's moving enough to make some new ones. A story itself of disapperance and reemergence, and the potential of cinema to bridge past and present as if decades were days it's potent and poignant enough to reach newomers to Erice's work, even as fans pore over its self-reflective details.
Guy Lodge, Variety


★★★★
'There is something deeply civilised and gentle about this film.
A mysterious, digressve, long and baggily constructed film possessed of a distinctive richness and humanity, all about the balance between memory and forgetting which we all negotiate as we come to the end of our lives. And it is also about cinema, which helps to promote memory and retrieve that which has vanished, even as it is itself in danger of being forgotten.'
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

"At a disinterred cinema, light and shadow plays over rapt faces in the dark, in Erice's love letter to all he knows."
Nick Hasted, The Arts Desk

'Critic's Pick'
"A gently shattering tribute to the magic of film...It capture the essence of his whole career...
In some respects it feels like the most nakedly personal film the now 83-year-old has ever made. In others, it feels like the only film he's ever made.  Or maybe all of them.'
David Erlich IndiWire