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This breakthrough feature by José Luis Guerin, Professor of Cinematography at Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra, has been generating a cult reputation on the festival circuit over the past twelve months. Not without reason: just as a novel like Tristram Shandy makes you consider the art of reading anew, the similarly unpredictable In the City of Sylvia serves as a primer of sorts in how (and why) one watches movies. You won’t be able to look at the world around you in quite the same way again afterwards.

A pale, shaggy-haired, wolfishly handsome young man (Xavier Lafitte) installs himself upon the terrace of the Conservatoire in Strasbourg with a sketchpad and pencil, observing (and committing to paper) the street theatre passing before his eyes: rowing couples, the hawkers moving from table to table, the hapless waitress trying not to spill the few drinks orders she’s managed to get right. Then his eyes lock with a mysterious brunette: thinking he knows her, he starts to follow her through the streets…

There follows a mystery in bright sunshine. What provenance those “Laure, Je T’Aime”s we see sprayed everywhere? Is it significant that the recording of “Heart of Glass” our hero hears in a bar should skip on the line “Love is so confusing/There’s no peace of mind”? Like the Paris-set L’Appartement, parts of it can’t help but remind one of those old Kronenbourg 1664 ads, and yes, it helps that the assumed Sylvia herself (Pilar López de Ayala) is the sort of lithe, full-lipped beauty that usually shows up on a tennis court these days.

Yet there’s wit here - the pursued constantly wrongfoots her pursuer - and a great deal of pleasure: that which comes with wandering city streets in a late afternoon’s cool breeze, getting the sense of an unfamiliar place, even as with each new turn, there follows the possibility of getting lost. As an illustration of what the French would call un divertissement, what the Situationists called la dérive, and what the Strasbourg Office of Tourism surely considers the best free publicity it’s had in years, it’s practically faultless.

 

Mike McCahill on 29th May 2009
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