Look Who's Stalking
by Vadim Rizov 
In the City of Sylvia stars
Xavier Lafitte as a nameless young man who wanders through a Strasbourg summer with a notebook and a perpetually glazed look on his face. He sits in caf�s and sketches, but really he's trying to get girls to contemplate his glossy hair and wispy mustache, though it's unclear if even he's aware of his obvious motivation. Later, he spends a lot of time following a poor young woman (
Pilar Lopez de Ayala) he thinks might be Sylvie, a potential soulmate he met a few years ago and has been trying to find ever since. That, however, isn't an acceptable excuse for stalking, as the she tells him when he finally has the nerve to ask if she is who he thinks she is. Nicely but firmly, she tells him she isn't and he just scared the hell out of her. Suitably chastened, he skulks off to a bar, where he does a little air-drumming to Blondie's "Heart of Glass" and stops bothering people.
Sylvia is an intensely lovable movie about a less than impressive dreamer who seems to think that because he's having a reverie, it's OK to act badly. His walks, despite their dubious motivation, give director
Jose Luis Guerin a great excuse to slowly travel through the home of the European Parliament and legislative capital of the EU. Strasbourg stands in for a generic European city?long paved streets devoid of cars, mingled architecture but nothing younger than 50 years old, beautiful weather?and the movie indulges in a bit of Euro travel porn; it could act as an ad for tourists contemplating a visit. Scenic charms aside, Strasbourg's depicted as a casually multi-lingual city, but the artist doesn't notice the various ethnicities, aside from a gypsy performance he witnesses. Class tensions, immigration growing pains and the like are generally overlooked; our hero mostly gawks at girls.
Full of (yes) long tracking shots and very little dialogue,
Sylvia might be dismissed as purely a "festival film," seeing DVD release after sporadic American showings and no theatrical distributor (it had a week-long run at New York's Anthology Film Archives). To get it out there, Guerin traveled the international circuit for a year, producing a video diary (2010's
Guest) in which the director himself is the wanderer. Like
Sylvia, it begins with Guerin sketching away, and he's eager to prove what an open-minded observer he is, spending much of the film visiting the city's marginalized, allowing them to recount their stories at length, a self-conscious corrective to the indulgent film he's promoting. It's very worthy-minded and slightly self-congratulatory, the opposite of
Sylvia's skeptical view of The Artist.
Sylvia cinematographer
Natasha Braier's camera travels slowly or stands still, creating a sketchbook richer than the young man's. Enjoyable digressive, it awards equal time to a surly street person rolling a wine bottle across the street and a persistent African watch salesman. The gaze is sometimes the femme-centric protagonist's, but it's largely Guerin's, stopping to observe while his quasi-hero runs around.
Sylvia's not afraid to turn outright cartoonish, sending the pursuer after his quarry through back-alley passages, where he both disappears and reappears unpredictably. He's somewhere between distressed and bemused, but the film revels in the gorgeous weather, street life and colorful behavior on the fringes.
It could be a complaint that
Sylvia spends a
lot of time fetishizing a number of interchangeably attractive women on the streets. This is true, even if it's the point of view of the artist, whose unswerving gaze is unnerving a lot of people. That the movie addresses this head-on through gives its fragmentary story a backbone; suitably chastened and freed of his sudden obligation to walk around the city moony-eyed, the young man becomes more relaxed and much less irritating. Otherwise,
Sylvia is an outstandingly shot movie that's curious about the city it takes place in without leaning too hard on Guerin's good intentions in leveling the screen time given to the solipsistic stalker on vacation and the often far more intriguing dispossessed around him. He doesn't stop to look, but the film does.
Posted by ahillis at May 24, 2011 1:25 PM
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