The opening twenty minutes of \u201cClose Your Eyes,\u201d the third fiction feature from Spanish director Victor Erice, and his first film in thirty years (his documentary, \u201cThe Quince Tree Sun,\u201d came out in 1993; the debut feature that made his reputation was 1973\u2019s \u201cThe Spirit of the Beehive\u201d), are as quietly spellbinding as anything you\u2019ll see this year, or decade, or century.<\/p>\n
The time is 1947, shortly after the Second World War, and the Spanish Civil War as well; the setting is an estate outside of Paris called Triste Del Rey\u2014the sadness of the king\u2014and the characters are an older man and a Spanish man in middle age. \u201cChess is a reflection of the world,\u201d the older man says before he tells the younger of his plight, the disappearance of his now-teenage daughter, thought to now be in Shanghai. He refers to a movement made by this loved one as her \u201cShanghai gesture,\u201d and real heads will know. This movie is threaded through with cinematic allusions. And this scenario isn\u2019t even the actual movie\u2014it\u2019s two-thirds of the extant footage of a never-finished movie called \u201cThe Farewell Gaze.\u201d Its lead actor, Julio Arenas (Jos\u00e9 Coronado, a relatively assured figure when we first see him), walked off the set one day after a cut was called, and was never seen again. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The opening twenty minutes of \u201cClose Your Eyes,\u201d the third fiction feature from Spanish director Victor Erice, and his first film in thirty years (his documentary, \u201cThe Quince Tree Sun,\u201d came out in 1993; the debut feature that made his reputation was 1973\u2019s \u201cThe Spirit of the Beehive\u201d), are as quietly spellbinding as anything you\u2019ll …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[45,47],"class_list":["post-1506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drama-movies","tag-drama","tag-mystery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}