In The City Of Sylvia (En La Ciudad De Sylvia) (2008)
A young man drifts through sunny Strasbourg in search of the girl he met there four years ago in this languorous but seductive drama by Spanish director José Luis Guerin
It opens with a map, a key and a Byronic young man in a darkened hotel room, the hiss of traffic rising and falling outside like waves breaking against the shore. The City of Sylvia is a city of dreams - literally, it turns out, as the languid search for a girl becomes an almost silent quest for the elusive spirit of romance. José Luis Guerin's film is an achingly evocative summation of that churning sense of yearning whereby every stranger in every bar may yet turn out to be your saviour.
Xavier Lafitte is the man with no name who spends his days wandering the sun-dappled streets of Strasbourg in search of Sylvia, the girl he met in the city four years earlier and who's occupied his heart ever since. It's not a particularly urgent search. Lafitte sits in cafes and bars, sketching and scribbling in his notebook, nodding at pretty girls and enjoying the heightened, sensual acuity that goes with being alone in a fantastic city with a beer and half an idea for a poem.
Eventually Lafitte thinks he spots the mysterious Sylvia - a beautiful young student played by Pilar López De Ayala - and he embarks on one of cinema's most leisurely chases. Since this is a movie and not real life Sylvia doesn't call the police but allows herself to be stalked through the streets and alleys. Guerin's camera - like Latiffe himself - invests this polite pursuit with delicate symbolic significance. A bottle rolling down the cobbles and then coming to rest against the kerb; a dress hung out to dry on the shutters, fluttering as if worn by an invisible dancer: the city has an inner life as secret and vivid as Latiffe's, and Guerin's camera conveys it in a manner that is whimsical, ironic, nostalgic, suggestive and always strangely hypnotic.
The director himself has a history of making films which bend conventional narrative structure into new shapes of his own devising. Sometimes In The City Of Sylvia suggests a lyrical documentary in which the real star is the city of Strasbourg. It's an epic travelogue that takes place on just a handful of streets. And although at first it looks like a random amble which might just as happily run for eight minutes - or even 800 - rather than the allotted 85, in fact it is artfully assembled so that impressions repeat and resonate like patterns within a piece of music.
That sudden softening of the features in the half-returned gaze of a stranger - could it mean love at first sight? The wine and the violin say yes, but Guerin's film is about savouring potential rather than admitting the rude intrusion of reality. This may be the closest cinema has come to recreating the covert pleasure of people-watching. Guerin's camera settles on faces and just stays there for a while, inviting us to speculate on these strangers' untold stories. For speakers of Spanish and French, no doubt, there's the added pleasure of tuning in and out of half-heard conversations as they emerge from the blare of a lunchtime crowd.
Eventually Latiffe catches up with his quarry. Is it Sylvia? Does she even exist? The answer isn't important in a film that's all about looking - for love, at other people, and for an answer to that burning question for dreamy aesthetes like Latiffe, alone in the cities of Europe: who is that girl? Sometimes sensual, occasionally surreal but always irresistibly seductive, In The City of Sylvia represents a sort of holiday from reality - it unfolds in a place governed by fabulous romance, fleeting beauty and the limits of the imagination. Strictly speaking hardly anything happens, yet to watch Guerin's film is to imagine that for an hour-and-a-half you inhabit one of those lyrical European arthouse movies where every street holds the clue to something, and endless creative possibilities drift in on the breeze - very much like In The City Of Sylvia.
A gorgeous speculation on love, art and the secret life of the city - recommended to closet romantics everywhere.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com
Xavier Lafitte is the man with no name who spends his days wandering the sun-dappled streets of Strasbourg in search of Sylvia, the girl he met in the city four years earlier and who's occupied his heart ever since. It's not a particularly urgent search. Lafitte sits in cafes and bars, sketching and scribbling in his notebook, nodding at pretty girls and enjoying the heightened, sensual acuity that goes with being alone in a fantastic city with a beer and half an idea for a poem.
Eventually Lafitte thinks he spots the mysterious Sylvia - a beautiful young student played by Pilar López De Ayala - and he embarks on one of cinema's most leisurely chases. Since this is a movie and not real life Sylvia doesn't call the police but allows herself to be stalked through the streets and alleys. Guerin's camera - like Latiffe himself - invests this polite pursuit with delicate symbolic significance. A bottle rolling down the cobbles and then coming to rest against the kerb; a dress hung out to dry on the shutters, fluttering as if worn by an invisible dancer: the city has an inner life as secret and vivid as Latiffe's, and Guerin's camera conveys it in a manner that is whimsical, ironic, nostalgic, suggestive and always strangely hypnotic.
The director himself has a history of making films which bend conventional narrative structure into new shapes of his own devising. Sometimes In The City Of Sylvia suggests a lyrical documentary in which the real star is the city of Strasbourg. It's an epic travelogue that takes place on just a handful of streets. And although at first it looks like a random amble which might just as happily run for eight minutes - or even 800 - rather than the allotted 85, in fact it is artfully assembled so that impressions repeat and resonate like patterns within a piece of music.
That sudden softening of the features in the half-returned gaze of a stranger - could it mean love at first sight? The wine and the violin say yes, but Guerin's film is about savouring potential rather than admitting the rude intrusion of reality. This may be the closest cinema has come to recreating the covert pleasure of people-watching. Guerin's camera settles on faces and just stays there for a while, inviting us to speculate on these strangers' untold stories. For speakers of Spanish and French, no doubt, there's the added pleasure of tuning in and out of half-heard conversations as they emerge from the blare of a lunchtime crowd.
Eventually Latiffe catches up with his quarry. Is it Sylvia? Does she even exist? The answer isn't important in a film that's all about looking - for love, at other people, and for an answer to that burning question for dreamy aesthetes like Latiffe, alone in the cities of Europe: who is that girl? Sometimes sensual, occasionally surreal but always irresistibly seductive, In The City of Sylvia represents a sort of holiday from reality - it unfolds in a place governed by fabulous romance, fleeting beauty and the limits of the imagination. Strictly speaking hardly anything happens, yet to watch Guerin's film is to imagine that for an hour-and-a-half you inhabit one of those lyrical European arthouse movies where every street holds the clue to something, and endless creative possibilities drift in on the breeze - very much like In The City Of Sylvia.
A gorgeous speculation on love, art and the secret life of the city - recommended to closet romantics everywhere.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com
