En la ciudad de Sylvia

En la ciudad de Sylvia (2007, Director: José Luis Guerin): When Guerin’s film played at TIFF last September, I remember being lured by the stills of a beau­tiful woman being tailed by a rakish young man, but what a strange little film it turned out to be. With long, almost dialogue-free shots, Guerin seems able to both dis­tance us and draw us into what at first seems to be a simple, even romantic story. The hand­some young man (Xavier Lafitte, looking vaguely like both David Bowie and Orlando Bloom) is a tourist in an unnamed French town (it’s Strasbourg, in Alsace, on the border with Germany), where he appears to be searching for someone. Day after day, he sits at a café near the School for Dramatic Arts, sketching in his note­book and people-watching. Well, truth­fully, he’s girl-watching, and Guerin’s camera lingers over many a beauty. As a man, I can say with con­fid­ence that Guerin cap­tures the sheer joy and pleasure of just looking at a beau­tiful woman. But our prot­ag­onist isn’t con­tent to just glance. He stares, and it’s obvious he’s searching each face for some memory.

All at once, he sees the one he’s been looking for, and jumps up, knocking over his beer. For the next half an hour, we follow him, in real time, as he pur­sues “Sylvia,” the name he’s written in his sketch­book. At first, the woman seems unaware of his pres­ence, but at one point he comes dan­ger­ously close and calls out to her. From then on, it appears that she’s half-aware of his pres­ence. He loses her, and we begin to wonder what’s going on. And then he finds her again, and by now it’s starting to feel just a little bit creepy. Is he just a garden-variety stalker? I often tease some of my female friends that the only dif­fer­ence between a romantic ges­ture and stalker beha­viour is whether the woman is at all phys­ic­ally attracted by her suitor. In this case, our man’s good looks have had us on his side up to now.

Except that by the end, we’re not quite sure what he’s going to do. He seems unable to shake his fix­a­tion with her. For a film so filled with beau­tiful people, sun­shine, and cobbled streets, I found myself more than a little dis­turbed by the film’s con­clu­sion. In the first half hour, I was praising Guerin’s ability to cap­ture “the pleasure of looking” but by the time we reach the open-ended con­clu­sion, that phrase holds a decidedly more sin­ister resonance.

I loved the film’s formal con­struc­tion. Guerin lets his camera run before his char­ac­ters enter the frame and long after they’ve left it, grounding us in sev­eral loc­a­tions, to which he returns throughout the film. We see many of the same people sev­eral times in the film, although they don’t have speaking roles. It cap­tures a cer­tain claus­tro­phobia, even in a beau­tiful European town like Strasbourg. The sound design really cap­tured for me the feeling of trav­eling alone to a new place. The man hears music, but doesn’t really over­hear con­ver­sa­tions. His inter­ac­tions with everyone are per­func­tory. The whole film feels care­fully put together as a kind of puzzle, and although I’ve been thinking about it for some time, En la ciudad de Sylvia made me even more eager to study film theory. It’s the sort of film that doesn’t give up its secrets too easily, and which will reward repeat view­ings, even if it is only to look at the heart-stoppingly gor­geous Pilar López de Ayala. Perhaps there’s a little stalker in all of us?

(8/10)

Tagged as: france, spain