Almost wordless and plot less, more of an observational documentary rather than a conventional narrative Jose Luis Guerin's "In the City of Sylvia" is certainly not like other films. How much you respond to it depends on how much pleasure you get from simply watching people rather than interacting with them. There's a central character, a handsome young man who sits and watches, looking we discover for the elusive Sylvia, finally settling on one particular girl whom he follows around the nameless city before finally confronting her.It's a creepy scenario, if it's a scenario at all. Are his motives romantic or menacing? Hardly menacing you might think, given the almost lackadaisical style employed by Guerin. There are other characters on the periphery but they are not on screen long enough to concern us. Visually, it's very attractive. Our handsome hero does like to look at beautiful young women and sketch them. The unattractive don't really figure. Since nothing actually happens you may find that, even at less than 90 minutes, this is something of a long haul. This is the kind of art-house cinema perhaps best viewed in a gallery and dipped in and out of; never quite boring but hardly involving either.

Maybe it's personal, but I can't get over how much the filmmaker seems to want to project himself onto this portrait of the artist as a tres handsome, young broody male version of Farrah Fawcett. You know the type--pale, anemic, wane, tends to wax on about clouds or girls or some other such nonsense, in a self-imposed 'exile' to a land of pseudo-intellectual pretension (Petrarch--check) but whose values are completely mainstream, safely unsafe. Conventionally unconventional.Plus the male chauvinistic gaze just really grates me. If this guy is so allegedly obsessed with 'Sylvie,' then why does he so nonchalantly flirt/sleep with some other woman? It seems a little disingenuous.I get the filmmaker is trying to play with fiction, documentation etc etc. 'Play' is the right word, however. It doesn't get much deeper than that, and lacks the intensity of films of other (better, more seasoned, and more profound) directors in a similar vein--Marker, Akerman, Jia etc.If you're going to put yourself in your own work, you better make sure you don't come off an oblivious a**hole.

After arriving at a city, an artist waits at an outdoor café and anticipates Sylvia's appearance. He then proceeds to follow a girl, but it turns out to be a mistake.Without much dialogue or dramatic genuflections, viewers may find that José Luis Guerin's latest film takes some time to absorb. Pushing the clichéd man searching for woman narrative aside it is possible to interpret the film from several view points. It is an abstract film about Strasbourg (almost unidentifiable as several languages are heard), it is about observing women (mediated through the male gaze), and may also be seen as simply tracing an obsession.The title is somewhat misleading as Sylvia remains absent and emerges only as an image (a combination of all the women "elles" the man has sketched) throughout the film. Even the subheadings (the first, second, and third night) are ambiguous as most scenes happen during the daytime. Yet the three parts are ingeniously linked by the café waitress with slightly different but highly related scenes. The ending in which the man follows the waitress suggests a continuation of his romantic search. The narrative ambiguities are successfully compensated by Guerin's reinvention of cinema as a tool to record and provide a vision beyond one's naked eye. Other details, such as the repetitions (the same graffiti and wallet peddler, even the girl's gesture resembles the advertisement model's), sound effects (the woman's footsteps), and use of off-screen space further generate pleasure for perceptive viewers of this light piece.

well, many of the people above me wrote that the movie was bad, but I actually really enjoyed it. I watched it in the Jerusalem Film Festival, and to be honest, one of the best movies I have seen. why? first of all, the cinematography is amazing. they have in most of the shots beautiful views, and interesting ways to film. second of all, the sound was VERY well made, and basically, those are the two main factors that make this movie a good movie. I think that you have MAX 100-200 words in the whole movie, and it is more of an artistic film, without really a very complex story to tell...I enjoyed it a lot, and I recommend it to Cinema lovers, because of its complex and interesting ways of film, and the wonderful soundtrack. if you are going to just "watch a movie"don't go because you will get bored.