In the City of Sylvia

Colour, 35 mm
Spain, France, 2007, 84 min
Section: Another View

Synopsis

That Obscure Object of Desire. Thirty years after Buñuel’s last work, his compatriot Guerín, 60 years his junior, also came up with a film treating the phenomenon “fantasma femenino” – the phantom of the beautiful woman which weighs heavily on the imagination of fiery southerners. In Guerín’s story, headstrong Iberian passion is cultivated with a touch of the French esprit. A young painter arrives in Strasbourg in search of a woman who bewitched him here six years earlier. Caught in a web of fixations and adrift in the labyrinth of the anonymous city, the artist sits in the drama school café, watching life go by. Gazing at dozens of beautiful young women filing past whose faces might appear on the UNESCO list, like Strasbourg’s historical centre, the young man misguidedly tries to catch a glimpse of something which doesn’t exist anymore. Watching, waiting, sensing… The viewer is immersed in the ambient sounds of a city in which the path to illusion is free of unnecessary words. A film of gentle humour and irony, with an unspoken tribute to Bresson and Rohmer hovering above the summer city...

About the director

José Luis Guerín (b. 1960, Barcelona, Spain) won Best Spanish Film and the Forum Special Award at the Berlin IFF for his first film Berta’s Motives (Los motivos de Berta, 1983), subtitled “Pubertal Fantasies”. This was followed by the films Innisfree (1990), City Life (1990) and Train of Shadows (Tren de sombras, 1997), which was screened in Cannes in the Directors’ Fortnight and won the Golden and Silver Mélies from the European Federation of Fantasy Film Festivals, among other awards. Guerín was profiled in Karlovy Vary in 2002 with his stylish documentary Under Construction (En construcción, 2001). After a period of ten years, the director developed ideas from Tren de sombras in the film In the City of Sylvia (2007), for which he also made the video sketchbook Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia (2007).