We've been impressed by the reviews and reports of two film reviewers we've come to admire regarding one film - In the City of Sylvia. Written and directed by José Luis Guerin, this film is simply extraordinary.

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Says Daniel Kasman:

"A loose theme of the best films seen thus far from this year’s New York Film Festival are films that do so much with so little. Resting on slim stories and minimal dialog, films like Flight of the Red Balloon, The Man From London, and Paranoid Park put aesthetics above script and in turn emphasize ambiance and abstractions over concrete meanings and narrative progression. José Luis Guerin’s stunningly lovely In the City of Sylvia more than belongs in the company of these tremendous auteurs, all the more so because his film seems to work with the slightest of all scenarios: a man (Xavier Lafitte) arrives in a foreign city and proceeds to look for a woman named “Sylvie.”

While we learn only the sketchiest of details about the woman he is looking for and have to wait until much later on in the film to find out why he is looking for her, in essence the movie is just that, a man looking. Admittedly, this could perhaps suggest a film either painfully fanciful in its romantic search, or intolerably focused on ogling anonymous women, but Guerيins film of fleeting romantic impressions caught and lost or missed all together lightly, nimbly avoids these pitfalls. Indeed, like the above films, it is this work’s simplicity that makes it impossible to summarize; jettisoning plot for an enigmatic, open-ended cinematic tone." [ read the complete film review ]

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European-films.net did an interview with the filmmaker:

En la ciudad de Sylvia (In the City of Sylvia) from Spanish director José Luis Guerín (En construcción) premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it was politely received, but went on to accumulate ever more positive notices as it screened at festivals in North America. The film, with no dialogue to speak of save for one conversation about forty minutes in, is indeed a work that needs some time to sink in. It follows an unnamed dreamer (Xavier Lafitte), who returns to Strasbourg after six years in the hope of finding Sylvie again. He tries to recognise her in the faces of the women that pass, finally deciding that one girl (Pilar López de Ayala) must be Sylvia. The editor of european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij, spoke with Guerín and López de Ayala in Venice.

Though made by a Spanish filmmaker, the film feels decidedly French and not only in its setting but also in its approach to cinema and more particularly its preoccupation with the male gaze. So why Strasbourg and not Paris or Madrid? "Simple," says the director, "because no one has ever filmed Strasbourg and it is a city I like. We looked for a city that could be a bit ambiguous about its identity. In the film, it’s Strasbourg and it is not Strasbourg. It is a city filled with female spirits. On the soundtrack, we can hear a lot of different languages; it is something of a foreign town for both the French and the Germans. It is an ideal town to be colonised by the ghosts of a woman". [ read the complete interview ]

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