In the City of Sylvia (En la Ciudad de Sylvia)
Dir: José Luis Guerin
Rating: 4.0
Eddie Saeta S.A. & Chateau Rouge Production
84 Minutes
It’s easy to forget that film is a visual medium before it is anything else. A screenwriter can whip up an engaging plot, fully developed characters, and enough high drama to bring moisture to Clint Eastwood’s stubbly desert of a face and still find her name attached to wretched piece of cinema if the director lacks the vision and style needed to make the film literally worth watching.
Writer/director José Luis Guerin seems to be mostly concerned with the visual, if En la Ciudad de Sylvia is any indication. He opens his film on a static shot of the main character, known only as El (“he”), sitting in bed with a notebook, staring off into space, trying to have an idea. El is an artist, but it’s not clear if he intends on writing or sketching. He’s just thinking. The take goes on and on as he just sits and stares. Then it hits him. He scribbles. There are few better depictions of the act of writing in cinema, and Guerin manages to capture it without the use of a single word — purely visual.
Guerin also seems to like relatively long, static shots, which can prove to be difficult for both the viewer used to frequent cuts and a director who likes to move around the camera. Here, he treats them like moving paintings — street scenes an art student in the city would sketch as cyclists, pedestrians, and vagrants wander in and out of the frame. For a film ostensibly about an art student, it’s a good idea.
En la Ciudad de Sylvia features very little dialogue or plot. It could very well work as a silent film if it wanted to. The plot can be expressed thus: El is looking all over Strasbourg for a woman named Sylvia that he met six years ago. Most of the dialogue in the film is incidental — a bystander asking to bum a cigarette, a waitress taking orders — there is one major scene of dialogue. For many, the plot will seem thin or extraneous, but the plot is hardly the point aside from being a vehicle to support the film’s themes.
While the plot seems like an excuse to show us the beautiful women that El follows around, he makes good use of it as an exploration of aesthetics and beauty, particularly in a scene where El flips through his sketchbook of drawings of women at a train stop while normal women — many of them beautiful, but still unmistakably “normal” — stand around near big advertisements depicting supermodels. Depending on which of the two one stares at could say a lot about a viewer.
Such contrast permeates the film. El is a man of model-caliber who is obsessed with looking at gorgeous women. Meanwhile, the city he traverses is grimy, old, and full of character with its deteriorated walls, stray dogs and well-worn roads. Each building is a different bright, eye-catching color despite the graffiti emblazoned on nearly every one of them. Even more distracting are the “ugly” transients that barge into the frames of the film: the fat wino, the trinket peddler, the limping flower vendor. El stares at so many women that it is these characters that stand out the best. It would be no surprise if El only saw a city of women. Thankfully Guerin’s camera is there to show us the limits of this masculine gaze.
In Nanni Moretti’s pseudo-documentary Caro Diario, Moretti muses that he would like to make a movie about the architecture of Rome and quickly indulges himself by ironically pointing his camera at the uniform structures of the suburbs. Guerin’s architecture documentation in En la Ciudad de Sylvia is one of dramatic irony, as El seems preoccupied with looking at women (is he there for love or just to sketch?) yet does not see the aesthetic value of his surroundings. El, then, is a poor artist, but José Luis Guerin is not.
by Danny Djeljosevic
