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Lonely Planet: In the City of Sylvia 
In José Luis Guerín’s fantasy cityscape, love is on the run. By DAVID LEVINSON.MAPPED on the droll urban odysseys of latter-day de Oliviera, José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia is a portrait of the artist as a young stalker, in which a dreary-eyed bohemian (known only as “him”) pursues a beautiful woman through the unmarked streets of Sylvia. A fantasy Euro-locale – all sun-glinted cobblestone and historic facades – Sylvia forms the perfect medium for its hero’s desire, and while hardly the first to twin the creative impulse with the libidinous one, there’s a method to Guerín’s horniness that rises above hat-tipping the ‘gaze’ in order to scope out girls: Striking an impossible balance between irony and wonder, he transmutes the raw base of his lead’s quest into a meditation on the act of creation.
Following a title card (bearing the semi-biblical declaration, “1st night”), the film awakens, mid-reverie, inside the man’s bedroom, where a Zen-like scaffolding has been erected around the gaudy cliché of the artist-in-search; enveloped in bird-chatter and the early-morning light, he sits perched above a notepad, staring blankly into space. The sense of calm is briefly annulled however when, moved by the boon of inspiration, he enters into a self-conscious ritual – miming invisible thoughts on his lips, before hurriedly spewing them on paper. Won-over, he then makes his way over to a local café, at the site of which – bathing in Guerín’s lazy rhythms – he tries to strike up a conversation with a girl; she greets him with dead-faced silence, and the scene culminates in the punch-line of spilled beer.
The “2nd night” opens with a study of light and shadow, generated by cars passing outside his bedroom window. Guerín then relocates to the same café, where yesterday’s lone girl has bloomed into a sea of faces. Seemingly tamed by rejection, the man only watches this time, pulsing his gaze across the contours of a dazzling, sustained sequence, in which the camera rallies his vagrant sightlines into a Manet-like tableau of urban communion. More than simple tapestry though, Guerín’s fixated shots have a way of stripping life to an absurd essence: People seem to hover in a distant glaze, their conversation reduced to empty ambiance, their actions the site of dully orchestrated miscommunications, as when a waitress repeatedly confuses the clientele’s orders. In other words, they’re a raw, senseless material, placidly awaiting the balm of narrative; that much is delivered when the man picks out a ghostly brunette from behind a smear of reflections, catalyzing a chase through the city whose roundelays quickly build into surefooted landmarks. Along the way, Guerín’s camera remains a vital commentator, from the way it lingers poignantly in suppressed alleyways – hinting that Life, as always, goes on –, to its uncanny ability to record the most delicate of impressions: the shadowed pattern of leaves falling on a face, for example, or the near-impercetible shift in light that envelops the stalked, as she impatiently awaits a train.
» In the City of Sylvia [Akld/Wgtn]
José Luis Guerin | Spain/France | 2007 | 85 min | Featuring: Pilar López de Ayala, Xavier Lafitte. In French, with English subtitles
José Luis Guerin | Spain/France | 2007 | 85 min | Featuring: Pilar López de Ayala, Xavier Lafitte. In French, with English subtitles
Steve Garden wrote:
Another filmmaker who unquestionably belongs in this company is the very fine Spanish director, José Luis Guerín. The festival got off to a great start with his exquisite IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA. Ironically, this is the sort of film that on paper I would usually avoid - a story about dreamy, magazine-pretty young people chasing love and beauty in a romantic, postcard-perfect old-world setting, but having seen some of Guerin’s other work I was receptive to Bill Gosden’s description of the film as a celebration of the “voyeuristic allure of the medium at its most rarefied”. It was indeed, but the real surprise was Guerin’s referencing of Robert Bresson’s little-seen and underappreciated masterwork, FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER. Some argue that SYLVIA lacks intellectual and political depth, saying that it depicts and panders to the specious bourgeois stereotype of a romanticised, privileged Europe. This may be a fair criticism. The occasional presence of underprivileged street-people barely registers on a political level, but perhaps this is the point. Everything we see is through the eyes of the central protagonist, a young aesthete intent on pursuing the single-minded desires of his heart. Guerin meanwhile takes advantage of this to direct our attention to the nature of creativity, the manipulative nature of cinema, the fluctuating uncertainty of perception, the pleasure of the cinematic gaze, and finally the joy of simply being. I can understand how some might perceive SYLVIA as a self-indulgent feel-good arthouse diversion, but for me it perfectly echoes Bresson’s optimistic conclusion of FOUR NIGHTS where the young artist channels his experiences back into his work. Unashamedly non-politically correct, SYLVIA is a highly sophisticated film that basks in the sensual pleasure of cinema and doesn’t care who knows it. Given that this was the first film on the first of 17 days of voyeuristic indulgence, the film set the tone for “my” own cinephilia, and perhaps that of the festival itself.