The Close Your Eyes team is still trying to assimilate the spectacular ovation that the new film by Víctor Erice received last night, who had not made any feature film for 30 years. The last one, El sol del quince, won the Jury prize at a Cannes Film Festival that in 1983 already screened the magisterial El sur for competition. And now he was returning to the French contest with maximum expectations, but he was doing it in the Cannes premiere section -where last year As bestas dazzled- and not in the official competition section. Apparently, according to some sources, this choice of the general delegate Thierry Fremaux would have annoyed Erice and that is why the Basque filmmaker has chosen not to go to the Croisette to present the film. The official silence about his presence already starred yesterday, when he did not appear at the photocall. A few days ago it was also announced that he would not grant interviews to the press.
Be that as it may, Close Your Eyes amazed the audience at the Debussy Theatre, among which were the directors Hirokazu Kore-eda and Amat Escalante, for its so authentic and magical offering of a cinema that was, an old cinema in which Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) participates as the director of a film in the nineties that could not be finished due to the mysterious disappearance of the leading actor and friend, played by a superb José Coronado.
Twenty-two years after the fact, a crime show in the style of Who knows where? investigates the case again and Garay becomes involved in the process, looking back at a story written by Michel Gaztambide that turns to memory and the passage of time, failure, oblivion, friendship or love in the that Erice weaves a major work cooked over a slow fire, with prodigious photography, silences and looks that say it all.
Closing your eyes also means the director's reunion with Ana Torrent fifty years after The Spirit of the Beehive, a film in which the actress made her big screen debut at the age of six and which won the Golden Shell at the Festival de Saint Sebastian. "I still have memories of that filming, when Víctor met me at school, the conversations with him... I remember it like entering a magical world," recalls Torrent in a chat with La Vanguardia, very excited to see yesterday with his classmates the movie for the first time. "I need a few days to digest all this because it has been very exciting. It's very nice to see how moved people are." The protagonist of Thesis says that she has not yet been able to speak with Erice to comment on the spectacular reception of her new work, but that she hopes to do so soon.
Despite the time that has elapsed, the actress and Erice have maintained contact. And she proposed the role of the daughter of Coronado's character when she was doing the play Las criadas in Madrid. "He told me that he had a script, that he wanted to make a movie and that he wanted me. I couldn't believe it. And that's where the emotion that all this has been began. The act of love and generosity towards me and towards the There is a lot of reflection on her cinema, on identity, who we have been, and Ana reappears in her experiences", affirms Torrent for whom the film has many details of Erice's own life, "from the same character that she embodies Manolo Solo to the clear references to El embrujo de Shanghai, of which he wrote the script but never filmed it". "All her stories are a generous process of hers and at the same time of discovery, testimony of what he is experiencing, of deepening and feeling," she adds.
Torrent defines Erice "as a very precise director who seeks a lot of naturalness. There is nothing left to chance. The light, the color of the shirt you wear... I knew what I wanted from my character just by looking at him. Shooting again with he has been beautiful, easy, affectionate, like being on a cloud" and he was always clear that he was on "something special". About her Ana, she comments that she "is a woman who feels abandoned by a father who appeared and disappeared." And in it, as in the whole film, the look is key. "The film that was left unfinished is called La mirada del adiós, the one we shot Close Your Eyes, and it's something fundamental."
Torrent maintains that he would work with him again: "Let him call me now and I'll tell him yes. What doubt can I have if I know I'm going to be in the best hands, prodigious hands for making movies?"
Manolo Solo confesses that he did not expect a reception like yesterday's. "I thought I was going to like the film, but I hadn't seen it yet, but the editing is really spectacular. It has been impressive and has hooked me as a spectator. It took me on the journey that Víctor wants to propose and the ending was very impressive," he says the interpreter, who was also highly applauded in the scene in which he dares to sing his version of My rifle, my pony and me, by Río Bravo. "Coincidentally, I had sung it in a show that I had self-produced from some Pinter monologues and I no longer remembered it, but as soon as Víctor proposed it to me, I said yes. So I prepared it and my intention was for it to be lived in the moment".
Solo carries practically the entire weight of the function on his back, a role for which he had to audition. "I didn't have time to prepare it and I did it fatally because I was very nervous. Also, when I opened the door I found Víctor, with how intimidating he is for me, because he is a legend. But then I relaxed." Solo was struck by the fact that he had not raised any rehearsals or talked about the character. "The instructions he gave me at the beginning was to abandon myself to the mystery and I, who eat my head a lot and propose a lot, we were not a priori a compatible couple," says Solo, who insists that it has not been easy for him to filming and that has ended up adapting to Erice's way of working. He is a man with a very strong character and I have mine too. But in the end I am very happy with what we have achieved."
He believes that playing Garay has been like "winning the lottery. He is a man with a backpack of wounds and scars who makes a journey to rediscover his past and who travels through many places physically and emotionally." To get into his skin, his face looks gray and he is very old. He is a being who has suffered enough and now dedicates himself to writing, reading and fishing in a caravan by the sea.
The actor believes that Erice has wanted to tell in the film many things that matter to him and affect him, and among them is the requiem for a cinema that will never return or that will become extinct like a dying dinosaur. The cinema of the 20th century. "Cinema in theaters is more oriented towards mega-commercial films and auteur films, for an audience that appreciates this more independent cinema. The one that has it more complicated is a cinema with a commercial vocation and a certain artistic cultural fickleness and a medium range of budget. Still, I think theatricals won't go away entirely, but times change."
