How Do You Live?
Hayao Miyazaki and Víctor Erice come out of retirement
Watching
The Boy and the Heron (2023)
In 2013 we were all pretty certain that The Wind Rises would be Hayao Miyazaki’s final film. It certainly felt like it, what with its total departure from any of the fantasy elements that characterize his other movies. But inspiration can strike even in retirement, and so the master animator is back at it with what will actually be his final feature for real this time. Probably.
The Boy and the Heron opens with a harrowing sequence, underscored by the blaring of emergency sirens, of a hospital fire in the middle of the night. World War II is on and young protagonist Mahito springs out of bed to run to the scene; his mother is inside, a hospital employee. Alas there’s no taming the flames, and as the prologue closes Mahito is left motherless. We resume some time later, when Mahito’s father has recoupled with a new woman (his first wife’s sister). With the war still raging, the family retreats from the city to auntie stepmom’s country estate, a sprawling complex with a traditionally Japanese building out front and a Western-style house out back. There’s also a half dozen little old ladies who run around keeping the place clean, and flying in and around the grounds there’s a majestic blue heron that takes an unnerving interest in Mahito.
The film stays grounded in historical reality for a curiously long time, to the point that you begin to wonder where this is all going to go. Miyazaki works very well in this mode though, as he already proved he could in The Wind Rises, getting both laughs (from the old ladies) and gasps (from a depressed and grieving Mahito’s self-harm attempts) in full and equal measure. Slowly things start to turn fantastical, starting with an abandoned old tower in the back of the backyard (seriously, how big is this place) built by “a great-grand-uncle who read too many books and lost his mind,” and continuing on with strange animal behaviors, led by an increasingly impious and bizarrely humanoid heron but also including a nightmarish chorus of fishes and a mountain of frogs.
One day Mahito notices his stepmom wandering off into the woods. He gives chase, not finding her but instead happening upon a magical complex at the heart of the forest where the film finally takes an irrevocable turn into high fantasy. Joined by the heron and a she-pirate, Mahito embarks on a journey through an underworld of sorts, filled with murderous birds and the requisite adorable puffy creatures that always show up in Studio Ghibli movies. He meets a fire-wielding girl mage his age who we learn is his mother and, finally, his great-grand-uncle, seemingly of (somewhat) sounder mind than we were led to believe and in search of an heir to his title as keeper of the realm.
One of the worries I brought into The Boy and the Heron was that it would just play like a greatest hits of Miyazaki’s work, which was especially formative in my youth; I cared about Miyazaki long before I cared about movies more generally, which in a way made the stakes for this one higher than for the average end-of-year release. Thankfully it avoids that trap by being a wholly original adventure, although this also poses challenges for its legibility. The received wisdom around the film seems to be that it is Miyazaki’s reckoning with his artistic legacy and his displeasure for his son’s own career as an animator (in this scenario, the great-grand-uncle is Miyazaki, Mahito is his grandchildren, and Mahito’s father is Goro Miyazaki, whose work papa Hayao isn’t too fond of). Sure, I guess that works. But unless we’re talking about Steven Spielberg literally making a movie about his childhood, I hesitate to reach for autobiographical readings as my primary analytical tool.
Another read on offer is the old standby, “It’s about grief”—and, well, the shoe does fit. But this is a grief story that resists both easy resolution and simple metaphorization; it’s too strange for the latter and too mature for the former. The movie ends so quickly that there isn’t room for any sort of epilogue showing us how much Mahito has changed and grown as a result of his adventure. He simply keeps moving forward, carrying his grief with him like the scar he bears from hitting himself with a rock.
Close Your Eyes (2023)
Víctor Erice had not made a feature film in 30 years, so his return at this year’s Cannes Film Festival was a major event (even if it was not exactly treated as one, premiering out of competition and thus outside of consideration for any awards). Close Your Eyes clocks in at nearly three hours long and you feel every minute of it. It opens with a film-within-a-film, shot on actual celluloid whereas the rest of the film is shot digitally. In the in-universe movie, a man visits an aging Orientalist at his French mansion in the 1940s. The mansion owner is a refugee from Francoist Spain, and he sends his visitor on a mission to find a lost daughter in Shanghai, so that the father may see her gaze one last time before dying. That’s about all we get before we cut to the present day, where Miguel (Manolo Solo), the director of the film, has been called in to a TV studio for an appearance on a Dateline-esque show about missing persons. The film was never finished: the lead actor, Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado), vanished before filming wrapped, never to be seen again.
The first two thirds or so of the film follow Miguel as he connects with various acquaintances who may or may not know anything about Julio’s absence, including Julio’s daughter Ana (Ana Torrent—wonderful, reuniting with Erice after starring as the little girl in his 1973 masterpiece The Spirit of the Beehive). At a used-book sale he chances upon a tome he had given to a lover (it’s the same one, with front-page dedication to prove it) and tracks her down for a fireside visit. And in what feels like a crucial scene, he visits his old film editor and his supply closet of dusty film reels to dredge up more footage of that unfinished film for the TV show’s use.
In the last third of the movie, Julio turns up again, but now bearing the name Gardel and lacking any memory of who he is. He works at an elder care facility run by nuns, where he’s allowed to sleep in a garden shed in return for doing the groundskeeping. Neither the sight of Miguel nor of Ana jogs his memory of anything, so Miguel hatches a plan: show Julio/Gardel himself in the footage of the last film he worked on before his disappearance. If you think you know where this is going, Erice has a bitter surprise in store for you.
Close Your Eyes feels like a valedictory film because so much of it has to deal with old age, memory, regret—the whole nine yards. It’s also, despite some of its plot contrivances, a remarkably straightforward movie. This is a film without frenzied montage or camera trickery (aside from the format-swapping), where most scenes comprise medium shots or close ups of people simply talking to each other. I struggled with it a bit, even at the same time that I recognized I was watching something patiently and thoughtfully made. It’s also, ultimately, quite heartbreaking. Whereas Miyazaki’s possibly-final film ends with life moving on, Erice’s closes the curtain on it, a eulogy for himself, celluloid, and cinema altogether.
Programming Note
Next month is the traditional best-of-the-year post! Compared with previous years, most of the films that are vying for a spot on my list haven’t been featured in this substack yet, so I have my work cut out for me over the next few weeks. Prepare for some surprises and start taking bets now on what will claim the top spot!