OPEN YOUR EYES (ABRE LOS OJOS)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Artisan Entertainment Director: Alejandro Amenabar Writer: Alejandro Amenabar Cast: Eduardo Noriega, Penelope Cruz, Chete Lera, Fele Martinez, Gerard Barray, Pepe Navarro, Najwa Nimri
Patrick Henry once said that it is natural for man to indulge in illusions. Our mere attendance at the cinema is proof of that. While we know, deep down, that what we are seeing on the screen is only a movie, we suspend reality and for a couple of hours we are the great lovers, the heroes that saved the day, the perfectly proportioned and handsome celebrities. Happily we don't need to patronize the theater or even read a book to enjoy these fantasies. We can daydream during those painfully dull parts of the day that find us engaged in routine work, and conjure up a host of spirits during our nights of rest. But what happens when those gauzy fantasies turn into nightmares: when our comely looks turn into a gory countenance, our favorite lover turns into a person we have tried to avoid, and we're sent hurtling into a Kafkaesque predicament which finds us guilty of crimes we have no recollection of having committed? With the special effects technology now available even to low budget productions and given the unfettered imagination of an ambitious director, our screen characters can change appearance and personality in a moment. Brad Pitt can turn into The Phantom of the Opera with the stroke of a computer key, while Disneyland can be transformed into Dark City in a flash of directorial inspiration.
The Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar eagerly exploits the medium's protean abilities in "Open Your Eyes." He follows up his first feature, "Tesis," with a bizarre tale of one 26-year-old man's nightmarish experience in his home city of Madrid, one which transforms his life to a greater extent in a period of weeks than the vast majority of us have experienced in a lifetime. The picture is audacious, though not as original in concept as Amenabar may realize. What is particularly noteworthy is that the director, ingeniously casting a flurry of images on the screen from a script co-written by Mateo Gil, has successfully transformed genres at breakneck speed from romance to sci-fi to horror, keeping us guessing for most of its two-hour duration about the way the enigma will be resolved.
The focus remains throughout on the handsome, self- centered Cesar (Eduardo Noriega), whose amoral character leads him to betray his best friend when such a deception suits his needs and whose ego will not permit him to sleep with the same woman twice. Obsessively pursued by the passionate Nuria (Najwa Nimri), he is immediately captivated by the cooler Sofia (Penelope Cruz), currently dating his best pal, Pelayo (Fele Martinez). When Sofia tentatively responds to his flirtations, the jealous Nuria reacts viciously. Inviting Cesar for one last ride in her car, Nuria floors the accelerator and, deliberately plunging off a cliff, she kills herself and grossly disfigures Cesar's face.
Like Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera, Cesar must hide his face behind a mask, having discovered to no one's surprise that Sofia no longer bears the same feeling toward him that she had the first time around. When plastic surgeons inform him that a new procedure will allow them to restore his original good looks, he can scarcely believe his good fortune. But shortly after he recovers his comely features under a dazzling array of futuristic machinery, he begins to suspect that what he sees is not necessarily what exists.
Amenabar delivers spine-tingling tension at select points in the drama, particularly when the good-looking Cesar looks in the mirror only to discover that his maimed visage has returned, and especially in one stark moment of horror when the woman with whom he is making love turns into the person he has tried to elude and who is thought to have died in the crash. While "Open Your Eyes" deals throughout with life's dualities--with the gap between appearance and reality and our inability to grasp thoroughly what goes on in the minds of others--its principal appeal lies in its enigma. We are challenged by the writers and director to figure out exactly what is going on; to determine who is the real Cesar and who is the actual Sofia. In that regard it shares the stage with the most puzzling movie of David Lynch's output, his 1997 "Lost Highway," about a jazz musician who believes his wife is having an affair and suddenly finds himself the main suspect in a murder he has no recollection of committing. While Lynch's plot is as baffling as ever two years after its initial screening, "Open Your Eyes" seems to reveal The Answer in the final seconds. Therein lies its major flaw. We in the audience sit upright, perplexed about the cloudy visions which are tossed before our eyes, assessing that all will be clarified in the concluding scene. When the big payoff does finally arrive, we cannot help feeling let down by the film's copout. While Amenabar might have unravelled the many quandaries of the picture in a more intriguing and clever manner, he takes the easiest way out.
Nonetheless "Open Your Eyes" is well acted by a primarily young cast headed by Eduardo Noriega and possesses several particularly bold images that take good advantage of the qualities of the medium.
Rated R. Running Time: 117 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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