Director: Victor Erice

Stars: Manolo Solo, José Coronado, Ana Torrent, Mario Pardo, Helena Miquel, Petra Martinez

Fifty years into a career which debuted with the astonishing, poetic ‘The Spirit of the Beehive’, Spanish director Victor Erice’s fourth feature, his first in thirty years, is a typically lyrical and semi-autobiographical examination of memory, identity, and the time-defying possibilities of cinema. Erice surrogate Miguel Garay (Solo) is a reclusive ageing director turned novelist living in Almería in southeast Spain. He is persuaded to be interviewed for a salacious documentary about his friend, heartthrob actor Julio Arenas aka ‘Gardel’ (Coronado) who mysteriously disappeared during the making of Solo’s 1990 film ‘The Farewell Gaze’. Unwilling to replace his friend, Miguel abandoned ‘The Farewell Gaze’. After the interview, Miguel begins to doubt that Gardel, who he had known since they were young men in the navy together, had committed suicide as he previously believed. He revisits footage from the picture, looking for clues, with his old friend and editor Max (Pardo). An elegiac feeling pervades the picture, as Miguel reflects on times past, and in how Erice suggests that cinema itself used to possess a transformative power. The photography is muted by Erice’s standards, but there are striking moments, such as when Miguel visits Marta (Miquel), a singer and ex-lover of both Miguel and Gardel, and cinematographer Valentín Álvarez shoots via flickering firelight imbuing the sequence with a vivid ghost story quality. The pacing may be a little too stately over an almost three-hour running time, but the Dreyer-evoking conclusion is stirring.

David Willoughby

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