In the City of Sylvia
It’s difficult to get a handle on this film, and the unusual eye it casts on people and cities. Maybe it’s the fact that we’re so close to everything: if the film’s world is a fish-tank, then the camera places us right at the water’s edge, on a high stool in front of the action. It’s as if our heads are stuck inside a living diorama, a box of objects which might be re-arranged to our liking.
The film’s protagonist (Xavier Lafitte) is a young man in pursuit of a woman named Sylvia, whom he encountered six years ago in Strasbourg. He has a very specific impression of her, although he can’t quite recall her face. So this city is fascinating on the condition that Sylvia is in it: no matter how meandering his journey is, desire lurks somewhere around the corner. His over-intense gaze turns on every stranger; he seizes on each sound as if it were a clue to his obsession. This gothically pale and love-sick youth is reminiscent of the hero of Hilaire Belloc’s poem, Juliet (How did the party go in Portman Square?/I cannot tell you: Juliet was not there./And how did Lady Gaster’s party go?/Juliet was next to me and I do not know.) If a missing Juliet is the key to our interest, then the entire city is being scanned for what it isn’t - but also for what it is. Being viewed in the context of an imaginary desire causes everything to be pored over minutely.
Nevertheless, all the people in this film are fantastically indifferent to being watched. A woman with the jagged profile of a cartoon faces us with a “knowing” look - but is it for us, or the sullen man sitting next to her? There are several very pretty, large-eyed girls, whom the camera observes absent-mindedly. A young woman with a bouffant and a small, proper face - who looks English to my eye - keeps popping up in the crowd. Each of these strangers is idly revealing or inscrutable, with a gaze that’s seemingly half-directed at us. Sunk in her own thoughts, absorbed in reading or remembering, each woman is no more aware of us than a figure in a painting.
Imposing a fantasy on reality generally results in a lack of depth involvement, but director José Luis Guerín gives every face its full weight - people with sharp, narrow features are re-shot from different angles; beauties are stared at until they become equally strange. Rows of commuters move like birds, mildly disturbed by noise or traffic, or roused by a single, inexplicable impulse. Whether pretty or vexed, mysterious or too obvious, these women all seem submerged - hence that feeling of being in a fish-tank. The only time we surface is when there’s an overflow: multiple accidents and spilt drinks zap us back into self-consciousness.
There are several reasons for this immersion: the film gives us that feeling of travelling and being diverted by everything new - but also the sense of a lonely person drawn in by the appearance of strangers. Occasionally the soundtrack is amped up, as if one sense is closed off to magnify another; sometimes we feel like invalids, over-attentive to noise, light and shade. However, a further explanation relates to the young man’s notebook, which is constantly flicked through. The sober, white font of the credits suggests a novelistic approach to reality; as the camera keeps crossing and re-crossing the same areas (a street, a café), we get the sense that space is being described by tiny lines and curves, as if to cover the light at every angle. Each move is like a stroke in an impressionistic drawing, or an incremental work of fiction; paradoxically, no space has ever seemed larger.
At night, the man lies awake while veins of light ripple over the room, pouring into wells and making little rivulets in the blanket. When he tries to write, again a pattern of light shimmers over the book, and his pen darts over the page, unable to pin it down. Towards the end, the book turns into a sort of animation: pages flutter back and forth between sketches, maps and blank pages. It hints at a new kind of novel: part essay, part storyboard, with cities condensed in between.
In the City of Sylvia
Directed by José Luis Guerín
Screened on April 9 2008 as part of La Mirada: Jewels of Spanish Cinema at ACMI
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[...] Lesley Chow reviews Jose Luis Guerin’s visually stunning In the City of Sylvia that was part of the ACMI’s Jewels of Spanish Cinema [...]