By Peter Keough

Spanish director Victor Erice looks back at what’s lost and gained in Close Your Eyes.

Close Your Eyes. Directed by Victor Erice. With Ana Torrent, José Coronado, Manolo Solo, María León, Petra Martínez. At the Brattle Theatre through September 9.

A scene from Close Your Eyes. Photo: Manolo Pavon

Victor Erice’s fourth feature in decades begins in 1947 at a sumptuously seedy estate guarded by a gnarly statue of Janus, a kind of bargain basement version of Alain Resnais’s Marienbad. In an elegantly appointed salon, garbed in a fez, a robe, and Persian slippers — looking like a cross between Orson Welles and Francis Bacon’s screaming popes — Mr. Levy, a man of many names and a shadowy past, awaits his visitor. His guest is Mr. Franch, a dour, wounded survivor of Franco’s tyranny. Levy asks him to take on an assignment: find his daughter, whom he left with her mother in China, and bring her back so he can see her one last time before he dies. M. Franch agrees, studies the photo of the girl that Levy has given him, and heads off on his mission.

But this is not the film we’ll be watching. It is a fragment of a fictitious 1990 film called La mirada del adiós (The Goodbye Gaze) that was unfinished because the actor playing Franch, Julio Arenas (José Coronado), disappeared without a trace in the middle of the project. Now it is 2012 and a TV show called Unresolved Cases, a slick Spanish version of the old Robert Stack series Unsolved Mysteries, is investigating the disappearance. They invite the director of the film, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), to participate, asking him to share footage, photos, and his recollections of the actor, who was also an old friend.

Garay has misgivings about rehashing a troubled, amorphous past. But he needs the money. The Goodbye Gaze was his second, and last, film. After its abrupt termination his career faltered. Now he makes a living as a translator, writing the occasional short story, living in a trailer park by the sea where he also works on a fishing boat. But even that existence is endangered as the owners of the property seem to have plans that don’t include him.

And it turns out that the show has aroused some of his own curiosity and need for closure, so he sets off on a kind of desultory investigation of his own. It is a reflective but absorbing search (though breakneck compared to the meditative pace of Erice’s other films) that involves puttering about a cluttered storage room, or visiting a pal from back in the day, the projectionist Max, with whom he watches celluloid reels of forgotten films while reminiscing and chatting about growing old and becoming obsolete. But, as such TV shows tend to do, this episode of Unresolved Cases stirs up some new information. The case will remain unresolved — but in a different way.

Ana Torrent in a scene from Close Your Eyes.

Some have speculated that the fragment of a film maudit that opens Close Your Eyes is a stand-in for Erice’s own 1983 El Sur, which had been cut short in the midst of its making by the producer. Despite its unfinished state, the movie proved to be a hit when it screened at Cannes. El Sur is a bit heavy on the voice-over, but it is radiant and deep and well worth a look. Like the new film, it also deals with the disappearance of a larger-than-life father, but it is told from the point of view of the daughter, a soulful urchin played by Sonsoles Aranguren. She is a mirror image of Ana Torrent, who played the girl in Erice’s astonishing debut feature The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), and who plays the estranged adult daughter in this film.

Or could this film be a substitute for Erice’s unmade La promesa de Shanghái (The Promise of Shanghai), for which he wrote a screenplay that was ultimately dumped by its producer? Along with Erice’s other works, these projects share themes, names, motifs, patterns, and such ephemera as movie theaters, movie posters, old movies, and battered cigar boxes containing relics of the past. They add up to a mature artist’s statement on all such losses, inevitable and irredeemable, whether professional, personal, or existential, and the longing for “the place from which you never want to return.” That place might be cinema itself, which offers consolation that is perhaps all the more powerful because it is illusory.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).