Imagine a European version of “Sleeping With the Enemy,” the domestic-violence melodrama from early in Julia Roberts’ career. The characters are more average and less articulate this time around, and the abuse more realistic in its banal emotional
death-grip. The heroine isn’t so much an avenging angel as a sad, increasingly resolute victor over her circumstances.
Most surprisingly, “Take My Eyes,” from the Spanish actress-turned-director Iciar Bollain, extends empathy to all its characters, including the husband doling out the beatings.
Said empathy doesn’t extend to forgiveness – Antonio (Luis Tosar), a brooding Toledo appliance salesman, is clearly the author of both his misfortunes and his wife’s. But the film has the risky humanity to suggest that nothing can change until he forgives himself. Even then, it’s probably too late.
“Take My Eyes” begins with Pilar (Laia Marull) fleeing her house one night with her young son Juan (Nicolas Fernandez Luna) and finding refuge with her sister Ana (Candela Peña)
At first, Antonio is just a black cloud on the horizon. Pilar steps gingerly back into the world even as Ana uncovers grim evidence of injuries passed off as accidents. When the wife takes a job in a museum gift shop, the husband comes around begging for forgiveness. He’ll change, he swears. He’s in therapy, he says.
She could use a little self-examination, too. Bollain and co-writer Alicia Luna are smart and pitiless about the ways abuse survivors can take on guilt. It’s unclear what cripples Pilar and Antonio more: their lack of self-worth or their lack of words to express it.
The perverse achievement of “Take My Eyes” is that it gets you to hope against plain common sense for these two to figure things out, perhaps even for their marriage to be saved. Without spoiling the denouement, I’ll say that Bollain is anything but naive. The movie rolls inexorably to a conclusion that seems preordained but it’s the journey there that gives off little shocks of sorrow and recognition.
At the same time, Pilar remains something of a cipher, as delicately as Marull portrays her. In the end, the focus of “Take My Eyes” is Antonio and the film may have its greatest currency as a warning to men in the macho Spanish society it depicts.This small, somber drama says things to battered women they probably already know. What it says to their abusers – of any country or culture – they can’t afford to ignore.
“Take My Eyes” | ** 1/2 RATING
NOT RATED In Spanish with English subtitles|1 hour, 46 minutes|MARITAL DRAMA|Directed by Iciar Bollain; written by Bollain and Alicia Luna; starring Laia Marull, Luis Tosar, Candela Peña, Rosa María Sardá, Kiti Manver, Nicolas Fernández, Luna and Sergi Callega|Opens today at Starz FilmCenter.
