The Official Xavier Lafitte Web Site

In the City of Sylvia **** EMPIRE, by David Parkinson

REVIEW: Graham Greene once suggested that the perfect film showed life as it's lived. On this premise, José Luis Guerin's working of his 2007 featurette has produced a masterly treatise on insular existence in an age of voyeurism and surveillance.

Were it not for his Renaissance-Romantic beauty and his constant sketching, Xavier Lafitte's El would cut a sinister figure observing women drinking in a Strasbourg café, then following Ella (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) along its winding streets. However, Guerin makes ingenious use planes and perspectives to reinforce Lafitte's credentials, and brings an everyday artistry to this near-silent docu-romance.

VERDICT: This has surprising depth for a piece with such a light touch and simple concept.

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photo: Eloi Sanchez Moli ©

Indiewire Review. Someone to Watch Over Me: Jose Luis Guerin's "In the City of Sylvia"

by Nick Pinkerton (December 11, 2008

"In the City of Sylvia," Jose Luis Guerin's odyssey of perception, is so dedicated to getting inside the act of cosmopolitan female-watching, it might as well be called "City of Women." Alert, feline-eyed Xavier Lafitte is a quiet young flaneur and diarist, an enigmatic figure introduced at loose ends in a summertime Strasbourg populated largely by drifting, bare-armed twentysomething sylphs.

 Xavier's vacation-quest is broken into three movements: First, Lafitte distractedly draining beers at the cafe attached to the local Dramatic Arts school, promiscuously selecting and discarding female clientele from his sight, scouring the crowd for, presumably, a suitable sketchpad model. 

Secondly, Xavier Lafitte indiscreetly stalking the beauty (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) his eye settles on, down boulevards and alleyways, across squares. Then, having found and lost his phantom, our man's retreat to a bar-nightclub where, dialogue submerged by the playlist, a gallery of forbidding goth girls imperiously throw back his stare.

Strasbourg, a presence in every scene, bears no resemblance to the booming and bustling metropolises of silent-era "City Symphonies" -- it's a weekend town yawning with welfare-state lassitude; in the three days over which the film takes place, nobody seems to be working, save wait staff, some street cleaners, a fruit vendor. Guerin's mode is a quietly bravura naturalism; a precise paring down of quotidian life into a vocabulary of incidents, spotlighting attention and elevating minutiae. The upsetting of a glass (a slapstick recurrence here) carries almost catastrophic impact. Save ambient chatter, the film is largely dialogue-free -- urban musique concrete, including street musicians, is much of the soundtrack.

The cafe scene is a journey of shifting focus and sightlines, a minutely calibrated negotiation through the outdoor seating chart as our protagonist's gaze traverses it; clientele are layered and overlapped, and Guerin shows his fondness for setting key moments in the dreamy collage of windowpane reflections.  As "City" moves by, phrases are repeated -- some passersby resurface (a face from the cafe returns in the nightclub crowd, a bent-legged flower vendor circulates through streets and shots), as well as intersections, a graffiti refrain, images (passing headlights crawling over a hotel wall announce the passing days). The viewer gets a certain pleasure from seeing this synchronous structure at work, and picking up the sense of an urban organism continuously functioning outside the narrative (the film shifts openly between extreme subjectivity and objectivity).

There's a faint air of enchantment here, in the Grimm Rhineland facades of Strasbourg, the "missed connections" longing, an encounter on the tram (Lafitte and de Ayala miraculously lit at a seamlessly match with the cityscape outside, as though floating above it) that abstractly recollects the trolley of Murnau's "Sunrise." At times this can all threaten winsomeness, thanks in part to Lafitte's achingly stereotypical "pale poet" vibe -- the well-molded face, dandyish vest, sculpted tousle. But Guerin's fable sometimes elegantly traces the outlines of an inchoate feeling: a scene with Lafitte waiting at a transit stop, surrounded by milling women in all shapes, colors, sizes (one with a trenchlike facial scar) -- blooms into menace, the crowd into a miasma. It's the raw heart of a movie that chronicles the pleasures and pitfalls of a prisoner of beauty.

[Nick Pinkerton is a Reverse Shot staff writer, a contributor to Stop Smiling, and a regular critic for the Village Voice.]

( posted on Dec 11, 2008 )

Photo: A scene from Jose Luis Guerin's "In the City of Sylvia." Image courtesy of Eddie Saeta S.A.

VILLAGE VOICE. "In the City of Sylvia": Pure Pleasure and Pure Cinema

Another one of the year's best sneaks by while you were distracted by the blockbusters

By J. Hoberman  

Tuesday, December 9th 2008

 In the City of Sylvia is pure pleasure and pure cinema. The fifth feature by Catalan filmmaker José Luis Guerín (shown once at the 2007 New York Film Festival) celebrates the love of looking, while placing a crafty minimalist spin on the Orpheus myth.

 

A sensitive young romantic (Xavier Lafitte), identified in Guerín's notes as the Dreamer, searches a foreign city (Strasbourg) for his lost soulmate. "Fetish" seems too cruel a word for the nameless poet's obsession with the Sylvia he might have met some years before in a club. And the underworld where this pre-Raphaelite hippie goes to retrieve her is a paradise—summery Strasbourg is almost ridiculously ripe with gorgeously individuated women. But, wait, could this heaven be another sort of hell?

Surrounded by snatches of overheard conversation, our hero seats himself at an outdoor café, fails to get a young woman's attention, clumsily spills his coffee, and cut . . . Day two will be more successful. The poet is in another café, unobtrusively sketching—or perhaps auditioning?—the girls who surround him, so achingly present and yet so unapproachable. In his first tour de force, Guerín organizes 20 minutes of looks and micro-incidents. Street musicians play, vendors and beggars approach, a bird shits on the poet's notebook. He changes his table, gets interested in a new subject, and then spots another beauty inside the café. Could it be? Watching her cross the street, the poet takes off in pursuit, toppling his beer bottle without a backward glance.

Guerín's alfresco Rear Window becomes a glorious Vertigo riff: The long scene at the heart of the movie is a circuitous pursuit through the old city. The camera follows the poet as he follows his vision through verdant courtyards, busy walking streets, and cobblestone back alleys. Does she know she's being stalked? Is she trying to shake him? He calls her name—as if afraid she might hear him. Will Eurydice look back? And suppose she does, what then? (Among other things, it means that this movie, much of it shot in  real-time and almost all of it in the wordless tradition of silent cinema, might finally break into dialogue.)

The drama is almost entirely visual—arising not from a story situation but from the fact of making a movie. Sensuous and gently self-mocking, In the City of Sylvia is predicated on a love of cinematic process (including film theory), as well as fascination with the urban labyrinth where, amid advertising posters of goddessy models, Sylvia presumably dwells. The final movement suggests that In the City of Sylvia is actually set in the city where all women are Sylvia.

 

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA. Stalking up on lost love.

IMAGINE, if you wish, Alain Resnais' "Last Year in Marienbad" filtered through the senses of Eric Rohmer, and you have a feel for "In the City of Sylvia" by Spanish filmmaker JL Guerin.

 In "Marienbad," a gentleman meets a lady in a rambling hotel and insists that they had an affair the previous year in the Czech spa oasis Marienbad.

 In "Sylvia," a young poet (scruffy Xavier Lafitte) follows a woman (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) through the side streets of Strasbourg, convinced she is the Sylvia that he met six years earlier in a cafe in that city.

 

 He first spied her anew during a lazy afternoon, shot in real time, in an outdoor cafe filled with an abundance of Rohmer-esque waifs.

 (...)

  There isn't any more of a story here. What counts is the atmosphere conjured up by Guerin and lenser Natasha Braier (XXY, Teta Asustada) on the streets of Strasbourg.

 It's people-watching taken to a sublime level. Moviegoers interested in a conventional story can go see any of the Hollywood blockbusters stinking up the multiplexes. But for viewers interested in cinematic poetry, there's "In the City of Sylvia," one of the year's best. 

(...)

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vam@nypost.com

They were great in '08

A young man (Xavier Lafitte) follows a woman (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) he thinks he met years earlier in "In the City of Sylvia," the best film of 2008.

" THIS is the season for critics to turn out lists of the best mov ies of the year. Un fortunately, many consist of highly publicized, big-budget movies that opened between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, while ignoring earlier films. In other words, critics let studio publicists tell them which movies deserve to be on their lists. As usual, I try to avoid this end-of-year syndrome. Here it goes:

 1. "IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA" (Jose Luis Guerin, France/Spain): Follow that woman! Minimalist romancer riffs on "Last Year at Marienbad." 2. "WENDY AND LUCY" (Kelly Reichardt, USA): A girl and her dog and a friendly security guard. 3. "…

Read the article on nypost.com