 | | | Image provided | | | | | | The movie brought to Orinda this month by the International Film Showcase* is a piece of cinematic art of a quality that people do not often get to see. It is not a thriller, even if there is an enigma. It is a long and poetic voyage, about memory, oblivion, and cinema itself. Playing wonderfully with what is real and what is imagined, with a film inside the film, with reality TV inside the film, with the past and the present, this absolutely unique movie is a melancholic masterpiece, worthy of the seventh art. It opens in Orinda on Sept. 13, and will play for at least a week.
The movie opens in 1947, in the castle of Triste-le-Roi, in France. An old man, frail and rich, named Levy, has summoned a private detective. He wants him to find his daughter who has disappeared in Shanghai, taken away by her Chinese mother who has changed her name. As he approaches death, Levy feels that only his daughter could see him one last time for who he really is. We are in the middle of a romantic tale, the detective is about to leave for a mysterious land, it feels like the beginning of an old adventure movie with characters bigger than life.?
And it turns out that this was an illusion inside an illusion. When the scene cuts, we understand that we were the witnesses to the filming of a movie that was never finished because Julio Arenas, the famous Spanish actor who played the detective, disappeared before the end of the filming. His body was never found and the police concluded it was an accident.?
We are now 22 years later. A live TV show that aims at solving cold cases takes on the old mystery and interviews Arenas' best friend and director of the movie, Miguel Garay. Garay, whose life seems to have been put on pause by what happened, has to return to Madrid and is taken back to his past with its unresolved questions. He could have stayed locked in his recollections, but a note from someone who saw the TV show sends him into a wild goose chase.
The different periods and the different stories are intertwined and interact around the concepts of loss, identity, and memory. It is like an origami that slowly unfolds to reveal a palimpsest where several lives have been imprinted and erased.?
This film was directed by legendary Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice. Within the span of 50 years Erice made four movies, and this one is his latest creation. In an interview with the film magazine Little White Lies published in April of 2024, he said that "What this new film talks about is an(.) unfinished film as well as the whole idea of "unfinishedness" and what that means in art and life." The revered director explained that cinema is for him existential and a form of destiny. His movies question the relationship between the real world and cinema. Can it have an impact on reality? "Close Your Eyes," asks the question but does not answer it, leaving each spectator to find their own answer.
The movie opens at the Orinda Theater on Sept. 13. For more information and tickets go to go to www.orindamovies.com/?
*The International Film Showcase is a Lafayette non-profit that selects acclaimed international films that have not been distributed locally and negotiates projection in several independent Bay Area cinemas. It can be found at internationalshowcase.org |
Lamorinda Weekly, Moraga CA