The name of Víctor Erice (Carranza, Bizkaia, 82 years old) continues to maintain a sacrosanct aura on the altars of world cinephiles. For 30 years, those that have elapsed since quince sun (1992), his career has passed with his back to commercial cinema, to theatrical releases. He could have broken with the frustrated adaptation of The Haunting of Shanghai in 1999, a novel by Juan Marsé on which he worked for three years and to which he dedicated 10 versions of the script, and which he ultimately did not shoot. But now there may finally be a fourth feature film by Erice with Close the eyes, project with a script co-written with Michel Gaztambide (Cows and Goya Award for There will not be peace for the evil ones) and that will star Ginés García Millán and José Coronado. The new film could be ready for the Cannes festival in 2023.
Although the script is currently being rewritten, in the usual polishing process of any film, those who have read the script assure that there will be no major changes in the plot. The story begins in April 2012 when a television program in the style of Who knows where locates a veteran film director, former writer, who lives in retirement dedicated to fishing. That director made a film, and the second was left unfinished in 1990, when the protagonist, a friend from the director’s military service, and a successful heartthrob in the cinema, disappeared. Of that second feature film, only the initial and final sequences are finished. The investigation of the television program causes an emotional earthquake in the filmmaker, his reunion with the people he knew in those years and the memory of his friendship with the actor.
Ginés García Millán will play the director, a creator who does not have much appreciation for his work, and who lives apart from the world and from everyone, due to family misfortune and the abrupt end of his second major shoot. José Coronado will be the actor, who at the time of his mysterious disappearance, on the edge of a cliff, was 46 years old, had received a Goya award, and feared for the decline of his physique, on which he had cemented the career of him. Both had been an inseparable couple of adventures, they had even shared girlfriends. Now, the director, after agreeing to appear on the show to show some of the images from the unfinished film and to earn some money, begins to get back in touch with people from his past, while seeking to clarify what happened to his friend, whom he does not know. more trace was left than a pair of shoes and his abandoned car. His body, if he drowned, was never returned by the sea.
Marsé, the power of cinema and the Borgian castle
In that libretto there are nods to Marsé, to the truncated project of The Haunting of Shanghai, a The South (1983) and his portrait of melancholic and devastated mature men. There is also an allusion to the power of cinema as a catalyst for emotions, something already conveyed by the gaze of Ana Torrent, a girl in The spirit of the hive (1973), in one of the most famous images in the history of cinema. In Erice’s new script, the two sequences of the aborted film take place in a chateau called Triste le Roy, a tribute to the work of Jorge Luis Borges. In addition, there are a handful of female characters praised by those who have read the script.
The project was being carried out in secret so as not to alter its good course. Cristina Zumarraga, of Tandem Films, has declined to participate in this report. The script was already underway since last fall with the intention of shooting this coming October. That stealth was broken last Tuesday, when Canal Sur announced that among its cinema grants earmarked for 11 fiction feature films and 18 documentaries (which together share 2.4 million euros), it would dedicate an item to the project Close the eyes, “with José Coronado and María León as protagonists”. Together with Tandem Films, in this film they participate the Malaga production company Pecado Films —recipient of aid from the Andalusian public channel— and Nautilus, Erice’s own producer. Right now he is still putting together the production and closing the cast of a film that, due to the size of his script, could reach two and a half hours of footage. However, there are still rewrites of history to come, and that could change.
Work outside the commercial halls
Erice hasn’t been hand over hand since quince sun, jury prize and winner of the Fipresci award, given by international critics, at Cannes in 1992 (25 years later, the French festival screened a restored copy). In 1994, the filmmaker was commissioned to adapt Marsé’s novel The Haunting of Shanghai from the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez. He devoted three years to writing it, under the title of Shanghai Promise, first with Antonio Drove and then alone. Marsé himself spoke enthusiastically of the result, although the possible length of the film of three hours led Gómez to ask him to cut 40 minutes. Erice agreed and in 1998 a production was launched that was blown up in March 1999. Years later, in 2002, Fernando Trueba made the film with a different script. Erice’s was finally published as a book in November 2001.
Since then, Erice has directed short films, collaborated on several collective films and maintained an audiovisual correspondence with the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami. In that way, Delivery (2002)—within Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet—, the red death (2006) or Broken glass (2012), included in Historical Center, episodic film about the Portuguese city of Guimarães, have shown more of their immense talent. He has done much more, such as participating in a place in the cinema (2008), by Alberto Morais, together with Theo Angelopoulos; film pieces about Antonio López or repeat with Ana Torrent in Anna, three minutes (2011), collective work dedicated to the victims of the Fukushima disaster of March 2011; and other video installations and film essays.
In November 2021, Erice, in his last act with the press, presented stone and sky, an essay on the sculptor Jorge Oteiza, and there he said: “I have not stopped being a filmmaker, which has been my main dedication. You forget everything I’ve done [después de El sol del membrillo], that there have been quite a few things that have circulated through places not typical of the film industry. The problem is not producing films, but where they are projected, and in recent years I have done work, but unknown”. The news of the pre-production of Close the eyes has gone around the cinematographic world, which anxiously awaits a new work by a fundamental filmmaker.
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