Inviting Stare: In the City of Sylvia
Strasbourg is a city in northeastern France, soaked in the history of Western civilization. It is older than the Julian calendar; it has changed hands and names, and it has been at the forefront of seismic shifts in culture and the site of some of humanity’s darkest moments. I’ve never been there, and it strikes me as odd that Strasbourg is not a city that surfaces much in pop culture. In the context of Jose Luis Guerin’s In the City of Sylvia, the most incredible contextual reference to Strasbourg to me is that Strasbourg was the home of Johannes Gutenberg, the man who invented the printing press.
Blank pages are not the dominant recurring motif in City of Sylvia, but we often observe the film’s protagonist, “El,” played by Xavier Lafitte, scribbling notes or sketches of faceless women in his notebook. The scratching of his pencil clouds the soundtrack, obscuring the murmur of conversation, the clacking of heels on the pavement, and even the euphony of milling street musicians. Soon enough, his furtive sketching subsides, eclipsed once again by the cacophonous lifeblood of the city as he retreats into contemplative repose. Or is it contemplative?
The majority of the film casts “El” much more in the mold of a predator, brazenly appraising the symphony of beautiful women that sit at the outdoor cafe or dance together in a nightclub.1 One of the year’s cruelest cinematic moments occurs when the impossibly beautiful Lafitte fixes a stare on a particular woman who notices and returns his interest. After holding each other’s gaze for a moment, Lafitte without warning shifts his cool, intense stare to an even more classically attractive creature at another table. The slighted female continues to chat with a friend, fighting back tears. For a long time, Lafitte surveys his domain from the throne of his chair at the cafe, sketching, watching, and supping with his eyes before rising to follow a woman, played by Pilar Lopez de Ayala. Stalking her through the streets of Strasbourg, “El” pursues with a mixture of timidity, resolution, and voyeuristic hubris.
His apparent prowess as a hunter is quite easily frustrated. At one point he loses track of his quarry in a precisely edited sequence splicing together static and fluid tracking shots (some at eye level, some at, uh, groin level). The sequence’s editing rhythm is initially puzzling — the elisions suggest lack of focus on the part of the pursuer or perhaps the elusiveness of the pursuant. In retrospect, the disjointed impact of the sequence, so determined by the architecture of the streets and walls (graffitied with the mysterious declaration, “Laure je t’aime”) upsets the seamless, real-time naturalism of the cafe sequence. Besides breaking down the naturalism, the fractures in geographic continuity force the viewer to wonder if the labyrinths through which Lafitte runs are even really joined. Perhaps in the real Strasbourg they don’t even share the same city block. The unease of the unflinching camera placements in the preceding cafe sequence now registers a disquieting sense of dislocation above and beyond the agitation of Lafitte’s search. As viewers, at least in the cafe, we had the security of enjoying the controlled, voyeuristic gaze.2 On the move, trying to remain focused on one woman, the entire city seems to shift and tumble, not unlike the urban landscape in Dark City. Lafitte’s grasp on (cinematic) reality is no more controlled than his authority over his prey.
When Lafitte finally reacquires his target, she has finished bathing, drying her hair in her bra before an open second floor window. Lafitte backs up against the window of a lamp shop to improve his vantage, when we suddenly see Lopez de Ayala behind him, settling an account with the shopkeeper. The transparency of the recently resettled naturalism of cinematic language is once again overturned — the voyeur wasn’t even looking through the right window! Are we?
Transparent or reflective surfaces dominate most of the film, and when Lafitte and Lopez de Ayala finally meet, the disastrous conversation is either an awkward case of mistaken identity or the worst pickup line ever to hit the cobbled streets of northeastern France. Again, it’s difficult to know whether to sympathize with the rejected pursuer or breathe a sigh of relief that this pretty young thing is wiser in the ways of the world than Lafitte gave her credit for.3 Perhaps she sees through him; perhaps he never saw her for the woman he thought she was (after all, he just spent a good deal of time ogling a half-naked woman he thought was the mysterious “Sylvia,” when the woman he thought was Sylvia was right behind him in a store that sells illumination). As a viewer, the ambiguous — but emotionally tumescent — scene is thrilling and inscrutable. As unadorned as the scene aboard the tram is, with the city and other buses flashing by behind the protagonists, it’s impossible to really “see” the scene for what it is; our window into these characters’ lives is limited. We’re trapped on the other side of the glass, on board a train that is hurtling nowhere fast.
Lafitte’s final scene is aboard a bench at a tram stop, framed by windows. He watches more women, of all shapes and sizes. These women are watched by the beauty product advertisements on the side of the tram bench stalls. Various townsfolk we have observed throughout the film continue about their business, drawn along the pulmonary flow of the city’s cycles to be refreshed and oxygenated by the sounds and casual interactions that make up the streets’ lively circulation.4 A breeze blows Lafitte’s journal pages, some filled with sketches and notes, the rest blank.
Unlike a journal page, I don’t believe that In the City of Sylvia invites us to fill in the unexplained spaces with whatever we see fit. Perhaps, like Lafitte’s young man, we are encouraged to sketch what we see, to pursue an elusive meaning (or, heavens above! — a moral) in his sun-kissed images. Shall we wait for inspiration to strike? No, that is too passive. I find the illustration of the movable type a little more apt. I like the idea that we are seeing something, and that it fits a pattern; perhaps we need to look at the elements in a different order or from another angle. Maybe the pages are there to be read in blackletter ink. The city that saw the first printed book in the world is now the site of a man who, if not unreadable, is enclosed within a translucent capsule, like an ancient codex, or a Biblical incunabulum, with no notes, no illuminations in the margins. There are only so many permutations that would conceivably apply to this pulsing city and handsome young man who haunts its cafes, bus stop, and the footsteps of an attractive young woman. He is, in the end, but a single letter on the page, and his place on it is determined by the mover. What I can’t decide is if that’s me, Guerin, or the city itself.
Edited by Adam K.
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- This observation I attribute to my esteemed Playtime colleague, Alex, who explicates this film in a slightly different way in a forthcoming review. ↩
- Actually, David Bordwell clearly articulates how our sense of surety has been compromised even from that sequence in his absorbing blog post, “Three Nights of a Dreamer.” Identifying the style as “cubist” certainly complicates the film’s emphasis on perception in the voyeuristic mode. ↩
- Another observation I credit to Alex. ↩
- A lot of the film’s attention to rhythm and tertiary, though strangely familiar figures reminded me of the films of Jacques Tati. I’m really unsure if that’s a complete coincidence, or if Tati is one of Guerin’s heroes. In any case, the depth of Guerin’s compositions and his choreography of people is Tatiesque, however (un)intentionally. ↩
Good review. I’m more sympathetic to “El.” I see him as a rather earnest figure: he honestly wants to find beauty and inspiration and I believe his “awful pick-up line.” I’ve more or less done exactly what he’s done countless times, albeit without a sketchbook. I’ve watched people and seen them move and talk and live their lives. It’s kind of fascinating. And, of course, I’ve done it in a cafe. And, of course, I’ve done the whole “flaneur” thing, strolling across the city streets with an almost floating disembodied and detached gaze. I’ve never followed anyone, though. Honest! Problem with “El” is that his search for beauty and inspiration is insensitive. He forgets about other people and how they might feel about his wandering, be it the wandering of his eyes or his actual act of wandering behind another. I like how the film constantly forces the intrusion of those who are left out from his imaginary, from his worldview: notice the poor people of the street, the homeless. The camera notices them, but “El” ignores them in his act of following. I think we notice more than “El.” I don’t know if the film breaks its reality or geographical continuity. I think it’s more along the lines of: we begin with a very tight camera-character relationship, where the camera more or less shows what “El” sees. As the film progresses, this camera-character relationship begins to wither, until we are left with scenes like the “wrong window” debacle, where we see the prey, but he does not. Similarly, we see the homeless, but he does not. I think the end is almost epiphanic: the women in all their shapes, seemly and unseemly, the ideal no longer there, the ideal having rejected him, and he disappears into the city.
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