"Abre los ojos" Plot
An imprisoned man hides his face behind a mask is telling his story, as a flashback, to a psychiatrist: his name is César, he is an orphan but he had inherited a fortune from his parents, and he used to live in a luxurious house of his his own. He was also very handsome and a renowned womanizer. His best friend, Pelayo, was jealous of César because he was not very successful with women. But one night, Pelayo showed up in one of César's parties with a beautiful woman named Sofía. When César met her and talked to her for a while, he began to feel something he had never felt before: love. And, although she was supposed to be Pelayo's girlfriend, he tried to woo her, spending that night at her home. But Nuria, with whom César had his last affair, was very jealous; she went to pick him up in her car the next morning, and committed suicide by crashing into a wall. César survived the crash, but his face was hideously disfigured, his handsome looks gone. Doctors said they couldn't help him. He was very depressed and still in love with Sofía. One night he went out with her and Pelayo, and he felt that they were very uncomfortable with his presence. But the morning after, his luck seemed to change completely: Sofía came to him, saying that it was he whom she really loved, and the doctors called him and told him that, with a revolutionary new technique, they could rebuild his face, which they did. César was happier than ever, but that's when the really strange and scary things started to happen...and César found out that the real nightmare had only just began for him....
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5 comments:
I am perturbed at how self-destructive Cesar was. He never gave himself enough credit, and his veil of confidence through the first part of the film was as breakable as his face. He had a great friendship with Pelayo (I really think he did), yet the whole film is a series of him doing/saying something to hurt that again and again. Finally, he gets fed up and abandons everything he loves/thought he loved, and kills himself on the chance he might wake up in the future. And then his dream world, "paradise" as i believe the company in the movie advertised it, ultimately became a nightmare. Even in a world where to be happy all he had to do was WANT to be happy, he was still miserable. Why can't Cesar love himself?
I don't believe his self-esteems is as big of an issue as his desire and absolute need for normalcy. Normalcy, in his filtered view of the world, in that everything and everyone has his or her place in the world. He's supposed to be the revered stud everyone wants to be and everyone wants to be with. Pelayo is supposed to the gloomy and zany confidant who's always available for a post-conquest game of ball but never has his own agenda to push. Nuria is the mysterious vixen you encounter once for a bumpy shag and then erase from your memory. When a character attempts to move past his/her set-in-stone description, his world starts to crumble; for here, he doesn't receive what his environment and attitude has trained him to expect and therefore unhinges him from his comfort zone. He is a dangerous perfectionist; he would rather die and hope for a better life with unknown consequences then deal with the reactions and actions of the present! I could tell this guy was a selfish and arrogant douche from the get-go but I added 'coward' to his resume by the film's end.
What I found most compelling about Cesar was that he was so drawn to opposing things. He was in the habit of never seeing a woman more than once. Assumably there was a part of him left feeling unfulfilled until he met Sofia; yet even after meeting her, after knowing he loved her, he still got in the car with Nuria. The whole premise of the movie was that he was caught between the dream world and real life. In one place where things should have brought him happiness, he was yearning for its opposite. I had a sense - and I don't know that this was intended - that Sofia and Nuria were the same person; I realize now though that perhaps I should take that in a less literal sense. They were the same person in that Cesar needed both of them - his recognition of this, as he started to see one as the other, haunted him even in his dream world.
i think i saw this movie at the perfect time. we had just talked about the conscious mind interacting with the unconscious in class on
Tuesday. in the movie, cesar is dead after that night her gets drunk and passes out on the side of the road. there are two specific instances where the preceding encounter happens: first, the doctor asks Cesar is he believes in god and that happens during the time in which Cesar is "Dreaming". of course this troubles Cesar because it's a piece of memory that resides in his "Real Life" when the girl in the car asks him the same question before they get into the car accident. Another incident is when one of the mental patients was flipping through the channels and Cesar sees the picture of the guy who represented "Life Extension", an event that led him to find out what was going on in his life, or more accurately "Dream". loved this movie by the way.
I began questioning this movie very early in, right after the car accident with Nuria. It seemed irrational for Cesar to be getting in the car with her, which led me to wonder if his subsequent decisions weren't based on the same reality as that seen by the movie viewer, an idea reinforced by the psych ward flashbacks. During the rest of the movie, I tried to put myself in Cesar's shoes, as if reality was occuring to him in a linear way but with a nonlinear world around him. This was a difficult task, as my mind had a hard time imagining being unsure if what's real is real.
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