In Sylvia’s City

Miguel Marías

José Luis Guerín's latest film, En la ciudad de Sylvia (In Sylvia’s City/Dans la Ville de Sylvia, 2007) is linked both to his current (May-November) installation in the Spanish pavillion at the Venice Art Biennale, Las mujeres que no conocemos (Women We Don't Know), and to his previous movie, Unas fotos ... en la ciudad de Sylvia ... y otras ciudades (Some Photos ... In Sylvia’s City ... and Other Cities, 2005), soon to be shown at the Vancouver Film Festival. The three stem from the same basic idea or common trunk, from a very similar starting point, but all three branches are widely different both in the amounts of ground and time covered and in style.

While Unas fotos ... is utterly silent, without even music, In Sylvia’s City is an outstanding sound film in much the same way as Bresson's and Godard’s. The former was made of black-and-white digital photo-camera stills, while the latter, conceived for colour 35mm film stock, had to be shot in 16mm for budgetary reasons (the paucity of the Spanish Ministry of Culture subsidy almost aborted the project), although it has been very successfully blown up to 35mm. There were no actors at all in Unas fotos, but there are some young performers (at least for the main roles) in In Sylvia’s City. Unas fotos was full of references to the European culture of past centuries (from Goethe to Dante and Petrarch), and fully explored the city of Strasbourg and some other towns, while In Sylvia’s City has no cultural references at all, and certain streets and parks of Strasbourg are among its main characters, both pictorially and on the soundtrack. The stills film had, of course, no dialogue at all, but a written private journal-like commentary of its narrator (the filmmaker/photographer/seeker of Sylvia, the unseen Guerín himself) appeared printed on-screen, while the new film has an eight-minute dialogue (after the first fifty minutes) in French between the nameless pursuer of Sylvia (Xavier Lafitte) and the girl he tails, believing she's Sylvia (Pilar López de Ayala); the follower is filmed from outside by the relentless camera as he walks after the girl or searches for her when he has lost her from sight.

We are told not a thing about him – he seems to scribble something and draw occasional sketches of people - and we only get to learn about his real intentions or motives in their belated and uneasy exchange of words on the tramway. There is no possible identification process with him, because there are practically no near or close shots, and we witness him always in the act of looking at women, perhaps eavesdropping, or following the woman resembling Sylvia through the streets in unrelenting or anxious pursuit of her trail. He's a walker, as she herself seems to be, and the camera tracks them down from a distance – so that, without knowing anything about her personality, we can fully understand her uneasiness and even her short-lived anger when she confronts him, after repeatedly but uselessly trying to evade or avoid him.

From the point of view of the pursuer, In Sylvia’s City could have been a melodrama, since he never finds the true Sylvia he so desperately wants to see again, and seems unable to find comfort in any other woman. From the perspective of the woman he mistakes for Sylvia, it could have been a suspenseful tale of harassment, and some filmmakers would have profited from the opportunity to make us suspect him as a serial killer, rapist or kidnapper – the warning posters about the search for missing girls in Unas fotos would have been enough ...

Instead, Guerín has chosen to ignore such commercial story-telling tricks and red herrings, and objectively contemplate, from a distance, the unexplained but not so mysterious goings-on of the characters, of which we finally know nothing other than what we can infer from their behaviour, from the way they look, stare, walk ...

Some may draw comparisons with or seek influences from three filmmakers Guerín avowedly admires very much. Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Bresson and Éric Rohmer probably stood out as precedents (or warning signals) for him when he conceived, wrote, shot and carefully edited In Sylvia’s City. But Guerín does not imitate or try to emulate any of them. Certainly, you may find his shots are as sharp and clear, as deceptively simple and as quietly flowing as Rohmer's – but there is almost no dialogue, no elaborate structure in two contradicting parts, no sociological or psychological observation of the characters. The soundtrack helps, like in all Bresson movies, to economise images and evoke the overwhelmingly present out-of-frame world; but there is no stylised fragmentation of space, no morality play, no meaningful chance or fate. And the pursuer is not an unmotorised version of Vertigo's Scottie, even if we stay with him alone for some thirty minutes and finally come rather closer to the woman he has been tracking for most of the film – since there is no obsession, no suspense, no plot, no conspiracy at work, and he has nothing of the Pygmalion-like vertigo that causes Scottie to try re-creating in Judy the image of Madeleine, with the dark, fatal consequences of which Guerín's film is wholly free.

Nothing much happens, at least nothing dramatic or weighty, and surely there is a risk in taking such a self-effacing stand when most filmmakers today tend to be portentous, grandly advertising whatever they may pretend to be achieving. I think, however, that In Sylvia’s City is, in its very modesty, a very ambitious film, since it is something which cannot be imagined in any other art form: not enough fiction or plot even for a novella; too much reality and cityscape for a theatrical piece; made wholly of movements and gazes as several human bodies wander through the space of a city, mostly outdoors – where the spectator is asked only to watch and listen attentively as things happen naturally and unhurriedly before him on the screen. Precisely what spectators may have become increasingly unaccustomed to do – so they may have to learn anew how to sit through a movie.