"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough."
- Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro" (1913)
José Luis Guerín's lovely and mysterious film In the City of Sylvia (2007) is in many ways primarily concerned with the act of seeing people. Not only does the main character--a handsome, long-haired remnant of the Romantic era played here by Xavier Laffite--spend the first part of the film sketching various women at a cafe in the European city he's visiting (Strasbourg) and the second following one of them around town, but at times the camera itself appears to be just as captivated simply watching people, taking in all of their mannerisms with such attention that it becomes difficult to draw any distinctions between an objective and subjective gaze.
The film opens with a series of static shots of a hotel room: an unmade bed; a nightable littered with various objects; and a window with a faded white, slightly cracked frame that is characteristically European. A title card reads 1st Night, but the first time we see the main character is the next morning, as he's sitting on the bed, legs crossed, pencil in hand, staring off into space. A minute or so passes before he scribbles something in his notebook. He makes his way out of the hotel and walks around, intently looking at his map, as though he's searching for a very specific location, and ends up sitting down at a cafe that is largely empty--another woman sits two tables away from him reading a paperback book and dozing off, and he calls out to her ("Excuse me? Are you from here?"), but she doesn't respond. The next day he returns to the cafe, but this time all of the tables are filled. This first extended sequence is something of a magnificent film in and of itself. Guerín lets us observe all of these people, sometimes from the point of view of our hero, who sits in a corner sketching, but also in a much freer way wherein we are able to take in the sheer beauty of the scene (including some evocative music and elegant use of slow-motion) as well as some of its quiet comedy (there's a running gag where the waitress keeps bringing people the wrong orders).
After spending some time staring, drawing formed but vague sketches of several women, our hero zeroes in on one particular woman (the extraordinarily beautiful Pilar López de Ayala), the one he may be looking for, who he sees through a glass window into the cafe. She gets up to leave and he, spilling his beer while getting up in a terrible hurry, decides to follow her. He does so for the next twenty or so minutes, the heart of the film, and Guerín films it all in a knowing and otherworldly manner. The use of Steadicam is quite astonishing, calling to mind the best of the work of Béla Tarr. Natasha Braier's photography is also inspired, turning the city of Strasbourg into a gorgeous labyrinth at once familiar and utterly fantastic. Most notable, perhaps, is the intricate sound design. Little by little, the sounds of shoes hitting cobblestone streets, cars and the metro zooming by, and the accordion of a street musician form a kind of street symphony that goes a long way in giving Guerín's film its form.
From the time we realize that our hero believes he knows this woman (at one point he calls out "Sylvie"), a certain tension arises regarding when or if he'll get to actually talk to her and find out whether or not she is, after all, the woman whose city he is in. But since Guerín seems to be making a more general statement about male obsession (a subject tackled in a brilliant, albeit different way in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo [1958]), this isn't a film where there could be any resolution. What there is, however, is a slight change in our hero. He eventually does directly confront the woman, only to find that she's not the Sylvie he met in Strasbourg six years prior, although it's clear to us that while he's disappointed, he's also fascinated by this mysterious woman. That night he goes to the bar where he had met Sylvie, one last, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find the girl he's after, and the next day he sits at a metro station near the cafe, looking over his sketches (some of which, importantly, are of the "fake" Sylvie).
Ezra Pound, in that short poem with which I began this piece, describes an image, that of a man who has seen several beautiful faces and is trying to find the words to describe that sudden emotion, for this is what the artist does. He keeps his distance and, to use Pound's phrase, finds a way to get this through "in little splotches of colour." Our hero, after having directly followed his muse through streets and alleys, recedes into the state of an artist. Sitting at the metro station, just as Pound did all those years before, he sees the girl again, and for a moment it's clear that he's contemplating getting up and starting all over again, but he remains sitting. The wind blows through the pages of his notebook, through his writings and his sketches and the maps he has drawn, everything he's worked on there in Strasbourg during those last three days, and he knows that whether or not this is Sylvia's city, it will always be his.
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