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The Mesmerizing Close Your Eyes Asks What Really Makes a Life
Victor Erice’s fourth feature is a stirring tale about memory, identity, and friendship, and it feels deeply, almost alarmingly personal.
That opening scene, with its lush images of footage allegedly shot long ago, even looks like it could have been a part of a real movie called The Shanghai Spell that Erice spent three years preparing back in the late 1990s, only to have it fall apart. But the almost bland textures of this section feel relevant to the whole project, as Erice sets up a stark contrast between the magic world of cinematic make-believe and the humdrum nature of base reality. Those opening scenes of that film abandoned long ago feature a man who talks about how often his name has changed over the years, and he laments the fact that his estranged daughter, who is half-Chinese, has been given a different name by her mother.
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