In the City of Sylvia

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA is a Spanish film by José Luis Guerín. It's slow going and extremely languid, telling vaguely of a man visiting a French city after not having been there for six years. He sits at a local coffeeshop with a terrible waitress, sketches, and searches faces for a woman named Sylvia. One of his sketches is of this mystery woman. It's entitled Elle (Her) and then retitled as Elles (Them), to suggest that his search is probably in vain, and perhaps even that Sylvia represents an intangible idea or presence, rather than a specific person. During this scan of coffeeshop women, he discovers a woman in red, perks up, and follows her around town. This is pretty much the extent of the plot, but Guerín's film is visually inventive, knowledgeable about cities, and more importantly, knowledgable about the average bored individual man and his milieu. During the coffeeshop scene where the man sketches and re-sketches the various women, Guerín's camera only unveils little bits of the scene: first revealing a man and a woman sitting next to each other looking anxious, and then returning to that man five minutes later revealing that the man is sitting at an opposite table from the woman earlier, and that he is with his wife at his own table. Guerín's inventiveness consists of various glances and suggestions about the sketcher's feelings. The women he sketches are all vastly different from one another, but all quite beautiful. In the essential chase scene that comes later, when the drawer follows the woman in red, we see an entire town slowly and in fragments as the woman circles around the square through shops, alleys, and street crossings. Even in the picture added in above, a simple scene of a woman waiting for the train is accentuated by the picture of a model who seems to be glancing in the direction of the woman waiting. The woman who waits is not as beautiful, and she seems tired and old as she waits. Later in this same scene, Guerín cuts to a breathtaking woman wearing a shawl and sunglasses. And even later, he cuts back to the same woman, who takes off her sunglasses and reveals ghastly burns. IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA is a gorgeous rendition of city, sound, and nervous glances. These glances lead to every event in the film: the chase, the sketches, the woman with burns, the woman waiting. It's suggestive, and yet illusory. It would be presumptive to say that I understood everything in Guerín's film, but it dared me to look, and to try to understand. That is cinema at its greatest, its most human.
In the City of Sylvia: ★★★★