In the City of Sylvia
would be trying if not for the confidence, grace and subtlety with which José
Luis Guerín handles his deliberately open-ended material. In Strasbourg, artist Él
(Xavier Lafitte) struggles to find inspiration in his cramped bedroom, eventually
moving outside to a café where he intently studies the faces and forms – mostly
female – that surround him. Employing next to no dialogue, Guerín conveys a
sense of being gripped by consuming yearning, which, during a discussion on a
sunlit midday train, is revealed to be that Él wishes to find the woman named
Sylvia whom he met six years earlier in a nearby bar. This information
certainly lends some basic meaning to the long stretches in which Él stares at
women’s necks, hands and smiling mouths, as well as the prolonged sequence where
he tracks an attractive female (Pilar López de Ayala) through the streets of Strasbourg while meekly calling out “Sylvia.” Yet the specific object of his
obsession is rather secondary, as Guerín’s deft, supple compositions – in which
background faces appear to be engaged in conversation with unrelated foreground
ones, reflections morph and disappear like fleeting apparitions, and the camera
patiently lingers on the disparate countenances of the city’s inhabitants – and
similarly sensual non-diegetic soundscape express the filmmaker’s primary
concerns (memory, desire, the act of (cinematic) watching) in pure visual/aural
terms. In the City of Sylvia is entrancing
and, more strikingly, engaging, its obliqueness inducing constant audience
supposition and exploration. And if its fill-in-the-blanks vagueness ultimately
causes the film, like a fleeting daydream, to slightly dissipate in one’s mind
and heart shortly after its conclusion, such elusiveness doesn’t preclude one’s
in-the-moment sensory experience from being bracing.
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