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| Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes; Ouvre Les Yeux) |
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 (10/10)
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Runtime: 117 |
| Public Rating: 8.18 (17 votes) |
Director: Alejandro Amenabar |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Romance/ Drama/ Sci-Fi |
Year: 1997 |
| Writer(s): Alejandro Amenabar, Mateo Gil |
| Distributor: 1 |
| Reviewed by: Aaron Graham |
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Complete silence as a woman's voice quietly whispers the haunting words "Open Your Eyes... Open Your Eyes" as if to say to the audience at large "watch this film with both eyes wide open, because what you're about to see is new and original and twisted and different and if you don't watch closely, you'll be missing out". For almost 2 hours, I sat in silence as "Open Your Eyes" played in front of me. Obeying the woman's voice's orders, almost.
Cesar (Eduardo Noriega) has everything a man would want in life, except for true love. He's rich, powerful, charming and good looking. A lesser actor would have come off as arrogant, but somehow we like Cesar's charms and feel sorry for his plights later on in the film.
Through a barrage of truly creepy scenes we see Cesar's nightmares. It seems he's been in some sort of horrendous accident and his face is somehow disfigured, wearing a mask to cover up this. He's locked up in a madhouse as a psychiatrist examines him, he slowly starts to tell his story.
The main shift of the film is when Sofia (Penelope Cruz) is introduced, she's goes to Cesar's birthday party with his best friend Pelayo (Fele Martinez). At first, Cesar's intentions are unclear. He uses Sofia as a guise to get away from Nuria (Najwa Nimri), a sometimes sex toy for Cesar, she's seemingly obsessed with him. When Cesar takes Sofia home and is looking at family pictures of her, a simple voiceover comes over, we find out that at that moment, while seeing Sofia in a different light, that he's falling for her. They spend the rest of the night chatting it up and watching tv, with Cesar staying over.
The next day as Cesar's leaving, Nuria picks him up and kills herself with him in the car. Cesar's face gets completely shifted and his good looks are no more.
To reveal the rest of "Open Your Eyes" would be a complete shame. Is Cesar being set up by partners out to 'suck his blood'? Is everything that's happening, a dream in itself ? Or is it something more horrible, all together more frightening then anything we can imagine?
Amenabar does an outstanding job with the direction, as he did with "The Others". He also co-wrote with one of his best friends, Mateo Gil and wrote the music. He was just 25 when he conceived the story , while laid up in bed with the flu. “Open Your Eyes” gets the big screen remake treatment when “Vanilla Sky” opens December 14 of this year. Its stars? Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, Jason Lee, Cameron Diaz, Kurt Russell and others. The director of the remake is “Jerry Maguire” and “Almost Famous”’s Cameron Crowe.
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