| OPEN YOUR EYES Director: Alejandro Amenabar "I always look for the best position to place the camera. In this film, as Cesar approaches madness, I tried to make the audience think and feel what he is living through. I tried to make them crazy." Alehandro Amenabar One should be skeptical of a movie titled "Open Your Eyes" when the main plot point concerns dreams. Doesn’t the ending seem pretty obvious? Fortunately, this Spanish film directed by Alejandro Amenabar isn’t that predictable. Just convoluted. Imagine Kafka by way of David Lynch with a bit of Buñuel. Then throw in such movies as Mask, Seconds and Man Without a Face and you get an idea of where it's going. Cesar (Eduardo Noreiga), a once handsome young man now locked up in a psychiatric hospital and wearing a mask tells a nightmarish tale to his psychiatrist. It all starts one morning when he is picked up by a jealous ex-lover who, in a rage, drives her car off the road killing herself and leaving him barely alive with a totally wrecked, disfigured face. From this moment on he enters into an inescapable alienated world where dreams and reality have become totally intermingled and ambiguous. Everything is out of whack. The dead woman he fears and hates (Najwa Nimri) suddenly appears and becomes the woman he currently trusts and loves while the other one (Penelope Cruz) becomes just the opposite. He is thrown back and forth in time where one minute his face is fine and the next it has morphed back to its wrecked state. Essentially, he has entered into the world of his mind and begins to believe his own psyche is conducting a conspiracy to kill him or at least drive him mad. The film plays this cat and mouse game until logic is thrown out and it becomes and all out fantasy. Open Your Eyes is about the fears and desires we create for ourselves through reality and dreams. In Cesar’s case -- since he is an attractive guy -- the worst thing that could happen to him would be for him to lose his good looks. So he seems to wish his own demise. Put simply the films very real question concerning Cesar ends up being -- is he losing face or just making them? The film is visually well thought out with dark, mysterious, Freudian-type shadows looming about that are apropos to its spirit as well as being unquestionably suitable to shocks. Unfortunately, its playful narrative structure ultimately becomes hard to follow. It’s as if the filmmakers want to thickly layer on the confusions until we feel so lost ourselves that we empathize with the main character, which actually may be the point - but it feels forced. If you’re interested in a simpler telling of the story it should be known that Tom Cruise is considering a remake. Which gives you at least one reason to go out and see this movie before Hollywood gets their hands on it. - Matt Langdon |