Movie Recommendations: Two Meta Movies about Incompleteness and Loss

Cerrar Los Ojos (Victor Erice, 2024) & My First Film (Zia Anger, 2024)

I don't watch movies with the mindset of providing a critical review or seeking movies to write about. Rather these recommendation posts reflect moments I finished watching a movie and felt driven to tell the world about it!

I only recommend movies I loved watching and am eager for you to see.

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There was a time once when I’d be very excited by a film just because it was meta. Basically just make a movie about a director struggling to make a movie, and I’d be there. I am well past that point; in fact I tend to find it annoying.

Somehow over the last week I’ve ended up watching two stellar movies that are metanarratives about filmmaking. On the other hand, the meta aspects are the lesser part of the narrative being told. In both movies, the directors never finish their films. In both movies, the directors contend with loss and regret that extend beyond the scope of their productions.

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Cerrar Los Ojos (Close Your Eyes)

This movie I’m incredibly excited about and I cannot understate: if you have a chance to catch it theatrically, take it!

Victor Erice is a unicorn, one of those outstanding and exceptional filmmakers whose movies seem to exist in their own plane living up to their own standard. Probably as a result of his methodic, determined perfectionism, he makes very few of them: Cerrar Los Ojos is only his fourth feature length narrative and the first feature he’s released in over 20 years.¹

When you go to see an Erice film, you are ceding time to his manner of inhabiting it. I don’t consider his movies slow, but they are long and methodical. You usually have to pay a lot of attention to minor details, and every scene insists on being as long as it needs to be. It’s hard to imagine anything he’s doing cut for time. But to be fair it’s hard to know what time it is while watching. You basically just get lost in the movie and that’s your experiences for the next while.

In return for your trust and attention he awards you with some of the finest visuals and enriching performances captured on camera.

Cerrar Los Ojos follows a filmmaker named Miguel who is invited to an “Unsolved Mysteries” style show to interview about his missing actor and best friend, Julio Arenas, who wandered off the set, never to be seen again, after finishing only two reels of Miguel’s second feature. The episode inspires Miguel to investigate Julio’s disappearance, and in the process trudges up much of what has been missing from his life: lost loves, lost chances, and even a dead child.

Cerrar Los Ojos has this amazing, elastic echo structure. The movie opens on the opening scene of Miguel’s feature, before skipping ahead 20 years to Miguel’s present-day. Various specific elements of the feature they were shooting echoes in the circumstances of Julio’s disappearance: it’s as if the movie foretold Miguel’s future. But then around the halfway mark, Miguel gives up the investigation and goes home to continue writing — and everything that happens after that feels novel, like a brand new movie. It isn’t until the end, when Erice reveals the second reel of the film, that you see the echoes of Miguel’s life return to the screen.

In a sense Cerrar Los Ojos is about a filmmaker who shot the first and last scenes of a movie, but the middle section could only be completed by living the next 20 years of his own life. It turns out more complete than if he’d finished production.

This isn’t Erice’s first foray into the incompleteness of things. Actually that’s a pretty good coda for his full filmography. In this case he hits vibes nearish Raul Ruiz. There’s an interesting sort of puzzle that happens between the reels as the elements of the script add up to the whole.

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My First Film

In the post-Global Financial Crisis era, right as digital prosumer cameras became affordable, Zia Anger produced her first feature film, entitled Always All Ways, Anne Marie. She sent it out to as many festivals as she could afford, and it was never accepted anywhere. She was never able to distribute it, so she turned it into a performance art piece about the demands and assumptions made of young filmmakers. And she worked as a filmmaker over a couple of decades, including making a few music videos and shorts.

Though she completed shooting and editing the film, it’s clear she was never finished with it. My First Film is a hybrid memoir / fiction about the production and all that went wrong with it — or, more specifically, all that was going on wrong with Vita, Zia’s avatar performed by Odessa Young.

Look, this movie should be annoying: a ‘debut’ film about the difficulty of making a debut film. But, well, it’s not. It turns out Vita is going through a lot of shit while making her movie, and both she as director and the movie she’s trying to make just isn’t honest enough about the real shit she’s going through. This movie ‘unpacks’ that realization, both in the Millennial therapeutic phrasing sense and in the actual editing as Zia investigates her own footage.

More or less it turns out that Vita’s spending too much time looking down the viewfinder to really acknowledge the disasters building around her. My First Film isn’t just about losing a feature film, it’s about people and parts of herself she lost along the way. One of the more touching moments is when Vita looks back and realizes that her crew actually believed in her which brings a sense of shame for feeling like she was doing it alone.

A repeated theme throughout the movie is, “Why did this only happen to me?” with the response, “This happens to a lot of people, but nobody really talks about it.” From an ass-oteric perspective² this movie can be really therapeutic to filmmakers themselves. However it probably speaks broadly to many early-20s young women (and men too) who launch themselves into the world without taking a moment to protect their base, and are left with only questions and regrets. These are stories not told in the ‘overnight success’ tropes and America’s general scorn for failure.

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See more of my movie recommendations here:

1. Before that, Erice made one movie per decade, and one of them was a documentary collaboration with his friend Abbas Kiarostami

2. Watch the film to get the meme