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Directed by Alejandro Amenabar Cast: Eduardo Noriega, Penélope Cruz, Najwa Nimri, Fele Martínez, Chete Lera, Gérard Barray 1997 |
César
Sofía and Pelayo
Nuria
The complete cast & Amenábar
Abre Los Ojos- Storyboard by Amenábar
César (Eduardo Noriega) is rich, young and lucky with women. The sole inheritor of a fortune he has no problems in life. At his birthday party his best friend Pelayo (Fele Martínez) introduces him to the sweet and gorgeous Sofía (Penélope Cruz) with whom he falls in love.
That same night César's last girlfriend, Nuria (Najwa Nimri), waits for him to drive him home. Nuria is still obsessed with César and gets jealous of his new love for Sofía. Out of jealousy she crashes the car with them inside. As a result of the accident César's face is disfigured and with it comes the nightmares...
José Luis Cuerda, producer of Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) comments: Open Your Eyes is like a river with a heavy current where various different materials float along: like friendship and betrayal to a friend, one love which starts and another ends, the appearance of certain things and what they are in reality, even if reality is also made up of appearances or even if those appearances drag along a bit of reality even if we do not want to admit it.
In Open your Eyes a tense thread of psychological intrigue unexpectedly projected into the future makes us search all corners without blinking and face all human feelings: Sexual desires, betrayal to a friend, self-betrayal, guilt, the sale of one's soul to the devil and the fragility of appearances which, paradoxically, today have a substance importance. We have educated ourselves to destroy paradise and when they bring it to our hands we cannot help it but destroy it, like a child fatally does with his favourite toy.
The viewer will ask himself what is happening, why the story is the way it is. He will tell himself that somebody is cheating César or maybe César is cheating him. He will travel breathless from the initial bewilderment to the responses science gives and to the human survival in the future. And to do this the viewer will use doubt, worry, fear and surprise.
Once the film is over, if the viewer closes his eyes and becomes lost in though, if he reflects on what he has just seen he can perceive that the things that were inside the intrigue were very serious, very profound in the sense that they affect intimately each one of us.
I will maintain the Thesis that Open your Eyes will be for a very long time held as reference to a very ambitious, honest and entertaining cinema.
Note from the Director
Open Your Eyes talks about alienation. What do we know about what surrounds us? How many different ways can you perceive the same reality? In this sense, Open your Eyes is for me more than ever, a challenge with respect to placing the camera, the point of view I have to take as director. I had never doubted more my role as observer.
In the film we talk about appearances, about what we believe to be real and what not. Everything that happens in the film is in the mind of César, played by Eduardo Noriega, which at the same time is locked in a psychiatric penitentiary. But, who are the rest of the characters? In this story we pose ourselves many questions that only get answered at the end.
César is a character with various personalities. He at least moves in a duality, there is a triangle made up of Nuria, Sofía and César. Nuria represents desire, passion, instability and adventure to César and Sofía represents the opposite, stability and tenderness. In some way we could say that the character of César, played by Eduardo Noriega, is a punishment to the posh character he played in Tesis (Thesis), like Jose Luis Cuerda (the producer) said, it is a character to whom they make check mate his own personality. What could have been a kind tangled comedy becomes the worst of all nightmares.
Open Your Eyes is a thriller with many elements: love, suspense, horror, science-fiction… In the film emotions start with the beginning of the story, when you see that they have to break up and they don't want to. The film ended up more exciting than the script. To that I thank the contributions of the actors, the photography and the music. Many times we have had the feeling that we have already lived a certain moment and I ask myself: have we really lived it?
"Imagine one morning you wake up, go out and there is nobody on the streets. You get to the Gran Vía (the main & largest street in Madrid), for example, and it is absolutely empty, you are alone in the world. That is exactly what you can feel in Open Your Eyes".
Alejandro Amenábar
Alejandro Amenabar with his Goya Award for Best Director and Best Film for Los Otros (The Others).
Alejandro Amenábar
Amenábar was born in Santiago de Chile, on the eve of Pinochet's 1973 coup-de-état. It was at this time that his mother, who had already gone through the Spanish Civil War, decided for the whole family to move back to Spain.
Alejandro grew up in Madrid and studied Information Sciences at the Complutense University. He was not exactly a brilliant pupil, and after numerous scholastic failures he decided to give up studying cinema. A helping hand from a professor made took him from studying cinema to actually making it, and from this collaboration his first feature Tesis (Thesis) was made.
Since his early short-film "Himenóptero" in 1992, which he wrote, directed, produced, and composed its music, Amenábar progressed and reached his first commercial success in 1976 with his feature Tesis (Thesis), which proved his potential. Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) was the follow up to the success of Tesis (Thesis). His third feature, Los Otros (The Others), made him an internationally acclaimed director.
Amenábar is also a gifted composer and his most notable contributions in this field include the music for: La Lengua de las Mariposas (Butterfly Tongues), 1999. He is an individual Spanish director who has no fears about embarking into phantasmagorical, psychological or even quasi-surrealist themes. Not yet thirty, this young film-maker holds great promise for the next few years.
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Penélope Cruz and Tom Cruise in the set of Vanilla Sky.
Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) was remade by Cameron Crowe and titled Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise playing the role of César, Penélope Cruz playing the role of Sofía and Cameron Diaz playing the role of Nuria.
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Genre: Length: 117 minutes Format: 1,85:1 Rated: 18 Language: Spanish, Director's Commentary & Isolated Soundtrack Subtitles: English Special Features:
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Thriller 