NYFF Review: In the City of Sylvia

A darkened room, occasionally bathed in the transient light of a passing car. A map and a numbered key; a hotel room. The same room the next morning. A young would-be poet (replete in white dress shirt and black vest) sits cross-legged on the bed, writing. He pauses for an extended period, the camera fixed on him, lost in creative thought as he searches for that perfect word. The long take that opens José Luis Guerín's In the City of Sylvia (En la cuidad de Sylvia) is more than a mere stylistic choice, for this is a film built entirely around gazes. Alternating between the objective (the "camera") and the subjective (through the eyes of the young man), it tells its story not through dialog (there's probably no more than twenty lines spoken) but via this brilliant use of shifting perspective. At its most basic, In the City of Sylvia is about the male gaze on the female, and much of its 84 minutes is spent lingering on a seemingly endless sea of beautiful female faces. It's the type of film that could easily slip into pretentious twaddle, but skillfully manages to avoid doing so. Divided into three distinct chapters (1st, 2nd and 3rd night - interesting, considering that the bulk of the action takes place in the daytime), it's not until around the halfway point that we get any semblance of a story. Our unnamed poet/dreamer has returned to Strasbourg, hoping to locate the titular Sylvia, a woman he met there six years earlier. What happened between the two of them is unknown, but the intensity of his quest indicates that it was more than a random encounter. Spending his days at an outdoor cafe in front of a dramatic arts college, he scans the crowd, pausing every so often on particular women, many of whom he will sketch in his notebook, though with barely enough detail to distinguish them as individuals. (One drawing is simply labeled 'elles'.) The cafe scenes begin in a wide shot, and much like that final scene in Caché, we're not sure where our eye is meant to land. The soundtrack is a steady hum of ambient cafe babble, though at times snippets of conversations are intentionally brought to the foreground -- a French couple arguing, Germans discussing their vacation, etc. Suddenly we spot the young man, staring. We then cut to his perspective, seeing exactly who it is he is looking at. Characters in the fore- and background are blurred, though the next time we see this same shot the focus will have changed to whomever he is gazing upon at that moment. There's a remarkable effect as the perspective shifts from the objective, where we are given the opportunity to set our eyes on any number of characters, to the forced subjective gaze of the poet. This shared subjective gaze naturally gives rise to a level of objectification, while at the same resulting in our own objective blindness. It's a gaze that captures, and at the same time is captured. Though our poet is clearly the sensitive, romantic type (and devilishly handsome to boot), there is a level of creepiness to the whole affair, particularly when he begins following (read: stalking) a woman for about thirty minutes through the labyrinthine streets of Strasbourg. Guerín doesn't allow the film to slip into the romantic pretentiousness of, say, a Téchiné film, and it is for this reason alone that the film succeeds in actually being about something, and not a shallow excuse to stare at beautiful women. What we have is a film that manages to capture desire and a sense of loss, and the lack of a detailed storyline only serves to distill them to their purest forms. The film's final chapter finds Guerín repeating much of the previous day's events, but through a level of abstraction that plays with our senses. Snippets of conversation, or music, are reheard, but in unlikely places. Characters reappear unexpectedly. Ultimately, the film winds up subverting the very ideas of perspective that formed the first two-thirds, with windows, mirrors and reflections making it impossible to latch on to exactly what we are seeing, let alone how and why.

Comments

[George Vermij]

Evocative piece. I didn't know that Guerin made feature films. I stumbled into one his installations at the Venice Biennale and was overtaken by the same sense of melancholy that you described in your review. His work 'Other traces' that is on display in the Spanish pavilion is made up out of different screens and projections that you can see in darkened space. The theme is pretty similar as 'other traces' also deals with brief encounters with muse like women but in a broader way and from different perspectives. A haunting score that is made up out of bits of classical music and jazz gives the whole space a very cinematic feel. You should really see it if you get a chance to hop over to Europe.