Open Your Eyes
Spain/France/Italy 1997
Reviewed by Paul Julian Smith
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
A prison cell in an unnamed city, the present. César, a 25-year-old in a prosthetic mask, tells his story to psychiatrist Antonio. Flashbacks reveal the following events.Good-looking César is attractive to women. At his birthday party he flirts with Sofía, the girlfriend of his best friend Pelayo. The next morning, he accepts a lift from his obsessive ex-lover Nuria. She crashes the car, committing suicide, and César is horribly disfigured, beyond the help of cosmetic surgery. Sofía prefers Pelayo again.
Drunk, César falls asleep in the street. On awakening everything has changed: Sofía now claims to love him and the surgeons restore his lost looks. But while making love to Sofía one night, she apparently changes into Nuria. Horrified, César murders her, yet finds everyone else believes Nuria was indeed Sofía.
While he is confined to the prison, fragments of his past return to him as if in a dream. César realises he visited a company called Life Extension. Returning to their headquarters, under strict supervision by prison officers, he discovers they specialise in cryogenics with a twist: "artificial perception" or the provision of a fantasy based on the past to clients who are reborn in the future. Convinced his life since the drunken night in the street is simply a nightmarish vision created by Life Extension, César leaps from the roof of the company's high-rise headquarters, resolving to open his eyes once more to real life outside the cryogenic fantasy.
Review
Alejandro Amenábar is the archetypal Spanish movie brat. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1972 and taken to Spain as a child after the fall of Allende, Amenábar attended the film school at Madrid's Complutense University, where he famously failed the narrative component of the course. His revenge at the age of just 24 was Tesis/Thesis, a sleek, taut thriller on the theme of snuff movies in which the serial killer, a professor of media studies, was given the same name as Amenábar's own luckless tutor. Shown in the UK only at the London Film Festival, Tesis was a sensation in Spain, where it had almost a million domestic admissions and won a clutch of Goyas, the Spanish Oscars.
Both Tesis and its successor Abre los ojos are shot in Madrid, but set in an abstract modern metropolis emptied of all local reference; their cinematic predecessors are not Spanish but American films. Like his US heroes, Amenábar knows no world but cinema. This is clear not only from the explicit references to, say, Vertigo scattered throughout Abre los ojos, but also from the way film-making is woven into a plot in which reality and illusion become indistinguishable. At the very start, in the credit sequence, a film crew is shooting in Madrid's Gran Vía as main character César cruises by in his sports car; half way into the film, the plot segues into fantasy, an invisible transition described by one character with the cinematic term "splice".
The most successful moments, however, are not those which cite Hitchcock (such as the camera circling the embracing César and Sofía, shadowing Scotty and Madeleine), but those that reveal Amenábar's own distinctively chilly style: the traffic-choked Gran Vía is suddenly emptied of life, or a crowded discotheque inexplicably falls silent. One of the few directors young enough to give a convincing account of youthful hedonism, Amenábar can also turn that same facile pleasure inside out, revealing the hollowness of the cult of looks so prized in both clubs and cinema. The big-budget Amenábar won after the success of Tesis is all on the screen here, in the sexy interiors (César's sterile loft, all glass brick and gunmetal blue) and the spectacular exteriors (the Picasso Tower skyscraper on whose roof the climax is played out).
There are some apposite ironies in the casting also. Handsome Eduardo Noriega (César) and plain Fele Martínez (best friend Pelayo) were previously teamed in Tesis; and once César is disfigured, their positions are reversed (Pelayo wins back Sofía, whom César had taken from him). The theme of identity as performance is fully explored, with characters constantly changing roles and repeating each other's dialogue: the fact that the Spanish words for face and mask are so similar (cara and carete) helps here. Since Abre los ojos was wrapped, Martínez has been teamed by Julio Medem with Najwa Nimri (Amenábar's scarlet woman Nuria) in The Lovers of the North Pole while Penélope Cruz (sweet Sofía) has won fame abroad as the sacrificial nun in Almodóvar's All about My Mother.
Amenábar's next project is an English-language feature with Nicole Kidman - and remake rights for Abre los ojos are said to have been sold to Tom Cruise. It's not surprising Abre los ojos' flashy visuals have brought Amenábar to the attention of Hollywood; he shares the US thriller genre's lack of concern for narrative logic. Abre los ojos, chilling in parts, especially when the truly disturbing Nimri is in the driving seat, runs out of steam before the final plot twists, and there's too much expository dialogue dutifully describing psychiatry and cryogenics. Nonetheless, Amenábar's virtuoso style and connection to the youth audience, both of which are resented by the Spanish film establishment, make him a plausible model outside Spain for a European cinema that bridges the gap between arthouse and mainstream.
Credits
- Director
- Alejandro Amenábar
- Screenplay
- Alejandro Amenábar
- Mateo Gil
- Director of Photography
- Hans Burmann
- Editor
- Maria Elena Sainz de Rozas
- Art Director
- Wolfgang Burmann
- Music
- Alejandro Amenábar
- Mariano Marin
- ©Sociedad General de Cine, S.A./Las Producciones del Escorpion, S.L./Les Films Alain Sarde/Lucky Red SRL
- Production Companies
- A production of José Luis Cuerda for Sogetel/Las Producciones del Escorpion/Les Films Alain Sarde/Lucky Red with the participation of Sogepaq and the collaboration of Canal+ España
- Supported by Eurimages
- Executive Producers
- Fernando Bovaira
- José Luis Cuerda
- Associate Producers
- Ana Amigo
- Alain Sarde
- Andrea Occhipinti
- Production Manager
- Emiliano Otegui
- Assistant Directors
- Ignacio Gutierrez-Solana
- Raul Otegui
- Mateo Gil
- Script Supervisor
- Carmen Soriano
- 2nd Unit Camera Operators
- Wolfgang Burmann
- Pablo Hernández
- Mateo Gil
- Visual Effects
- Molinare, S.A.
- Co-ordinator:
- Alberto Esteban
- Flame Operator:
- Aurelio Sánchez-Herrera
- 3D Imagery
- Post Data
- 3D Operators:
- Félix Bergés
- Pedro Blanco
- Juan Antonio Ruiz
- Belen Arsuaga
- Ricardo Gómez
- Inés Montero
- Special Effects
- Reyes Abades
- Set Decorator
- Carola Angulo
- Storyboards
- Natalia Montes
- Sergio Rozas
- Wardrobe
- Concha Solera
- Make-up
- Paca Almenara
- Silvie Imbert
- Special Make-up Effects
- Colin Arthur
- Dream Factory
- Titles
- Luna de Madrid
- Carlos Santos
- Music Performed by
- Orquesta Filarmónica de Praga
- Orchestra Director
- Mario Klemens
- Music Producer
- Juan Carlos Cuello
- Sintonía S.A.
- Music Production Manager
- Bartolomé Espadalé
- Music Mixing Engineers
- José Vinader
- Eduardo Ruiz Joya
- Soundtrack
- "Rising Son" by Andrew Vowles, Robert Del Naja, Grantley Marshall, performed by Massive Attack; "How Do" (trad), arranged by Line of Flight, performed by Sneaker Pimps; "El Detonator" by F. Alfaro, performed by Chucho; "Flying Away" by Marc Lee Brown, C. Franck, Nina Isabela Rocha Miranda, performed by Smoke City; "Tremble Goes the Night" by Chris Eckman, performed by The Walkabouts; "Sick of You" by A. Legardón, Onion, performed by Onion; "Glamour" by A. López, J.A. López, J. Díaz, performed by Amphetamine Discharge; "Arrefice" by F. Pardo, D. Krahe, performed by Los Coronas; "T-Sebo" by B. García, F.J. Ferrero, performed by Side Effects; "Yo Mismo" by A. Olmedo, performed by If
- Sound
- Goldstein & Steinberg
- Dubbing Mixer
- Patrick Ghislain
- Sound Editors
- Nacho Royo
- Pelayo Gutierrez
- Sound Effects
- Julien Naudin
- Cast
- Eduardo Noriega
- César
- Penélope Cruz
- Sofía
- Chete Lera
- Antonio
- Fele Martínez
- Pelayo
- Najwa Nimri
- Nuria
- Gérard Barray
- Duvernois
- Jorge de Juan
- department head
- Miguel Palenzuela
- commissar
- Pedro Miguel Martínez
- chief doctor
- Ion Gabella
- paranoic recluse
- Joserra Cadiñanos
- guard
- Tristan Ulloa
- waiter
- Pepe Navarro
- TV presenter
- Jaro
- Walter Prieto
- Carola Angulo
- doctors
- Fanny Solorzano
- secretary
- Luis García
- Javier Martín
- jury guards
- José Luis Manrique
- policeman
- Richard Cruz
- driver
- Raul Otegui
- service boy
- Pepe
- the cat
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Redbus Films
- 10,717 feet
- 119 minutes 5 seconds
- Dolby stereo digital
- In Colour
- Subtitles