Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed

Synopsis: It's Spain, 1966, and a high-school English/Latin teacher, Antonio (Javier Cámara) drives to Almeria on the southern coast in hopes of meeting his hero, John Lennon. Along the way, Antonio picks up two runaways (Natalia de Molina, Francesc Colomer)

David Trueba’s film took out most of the major Goya Awards in 2013 and is Spain’s entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category of this year’s Oscars. Don’t get too excited. I suspect that a good part of this is because of aspects which would resonate mostly with a Spanish audience, in particular the depiction of 1960s right-wing Catholic Spain and digs at regional accents and provincial life. Nevertheless, Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed, which is apparently inspired by a true story, is an amiable enough film, not big on plot or drama but a well-judged, feel-goodish treatment of themes such as acceptance, love and understanding in navigating the day-to-day hurdles of ordinary life

Cámara, last seen here as a gay flight attendant in Pedro Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited, is an engaging presence as middle-aged bachelor Antonio San Román who goes on a road trip to meet his idol, John Lennon, who is in Spain to appear in Richard Lester’s How I Won the War. His idea is to persuade Lennon to print song lyrics on The Beatles' albums, so that Antonio's students and Beatles fans around the world will not misinterpret them. It’s a small but sweetly selfless mission that very much characterizes the film itself. As his companions on this road trip Natalia de Molina and Francesc Colomer with their growing-up problems fit this agenda perfectly.

With picturesque cinematography by Daniel Vilar that captures the rocky, sunburnt country well and a low-key score by veteran jazz guitarist Pat Metheny this modest film never strains in its attempts to reach us. This it ultimately does with the only Beatles' song used in the film ,“Strawberry Fields Forever”, the song from which the film’s title is taken and that Lennon wrote during his stay in this strawberry-growing region, summing up its good-hearted spirit with a certain poignancy.

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