Guerín’s Tableaux Strasbourgiens: In the City of Sylvia / En la ciudad de Sylvia

En la ciudad de Sylvia has been greeted in some quarters as an unmitigated triumph and as the film to restore belief in the so-called art house film.

José Luis Guerin is rightly celebrated for such films as the pseudo documentary (on The Quiet Man) Innisfree (1991) and En construcción (2001). Filmed in Strasbourg, a city in which aimless wandering seems always to find one back in the vicinity of the cathedral, the film is in the tradition of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens. In the manner of his previous film En construcción the formal and temporal properties of a space frame the film which opens and closes within the established formal constraints set by the spatio-temporal framework. The film returns to certain streets at different times of a few bright consecutive summer’s days, and captures some of the same pedestrians, some more mobile than others, on different occasions. There is a strong sense of the quartier in which the male protagonist resides conducting business about which one is never informed. A marvelously rich sound mix gives us delicately rendered upward echoes as a couple walk out of frame past the junction at the centre of the image and into the canyon of the street. As the camera tracks in joint pursuit (with her pursuer) of 'Sylvia' it picks up and passes through a series of street sounds such as bicycle chains of freewheeling or back-peddling cyclists, music from car stereos and heels on pavement. If the protagonist will be the privileged site for an investment of the gaze Guerín, it must be said, makes sure the microphone vies for position against this privilege.

The replete sound mix nonetheless draws our attention to the film’s barely reconstructed sexual politics vis-à-vis the Baudelairean tradition. Before we proceed to the ‘A une passante’ dimension of the film’s pretext the opening scene is indicative of a rather pious approach to the central character. He is reclining on his hotel bed pencil and paper to hand, the very essence of the sensitive male poet. Perhaps away from home in a new city, inspired by his new surroundings, excited at the prospects of perambulation and requited desire. Anyone’s story then. Many males’ story is what it really is. Indeed this is one way of arguing that what follows need not be ridiculed for the apparent irony deficiency of Guerín’s film: the protagonist is a finely-boned, sensitive male, arrayed in loose-fitting soft white and cream attire, longing to find a soul-mate in a city in north-eastern France. But the sound distribution in the opening scene gives it away. The pensive hotel guest’s eyes flicker into recognition. The muse, the first of many, has indeed visited. The pencil goes to mouth to confirm that the ignition has indeed taken place and - bang! - it is pencil-to-paper time. What a noise ensues. This is not just any pencil to paper, this is high-definition sound transfer which is then mixed to come from off-screen; this is sound so resonant it seems to trail in the wake of the scraping lead-head. This is a voluptuous techne, gathering the viewer into the soul of man. We are in the presence.

If this is the myth of the writer, indeed perhaps of the writer on holiday as described by Roland Barthes (“Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop”). His logorrhea is complemented by his sketches, snatched outside the café of the Conservatoire, where the swaying, hair-flicking, exclusively youthful mass of Women make it into his notebook. Guerín even has the temerity to include a grotesque intentional-spillage-of-the-drink-scene so that the questing eyes of the Man can catch those of the waitress. Not content with one such recourse to cliché Guerín piles it on as the now-seated elsewhere Muse-propelled (he has moved seats to get a frontal view of the hair-twirling chignon-bearing Blonde who he has admired from behind) sketcher spills over his beer in his haste to follow Her through the streets.

In his Tableaux parisiens Baudelaire wrote the manual for such trajectories:

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair... puis la nuit! - fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?

Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!

Finally exchanging words with the object of his pedestrian attentions on a tram after she had temporarily evaded her pursuer, He recounts a story of a ‘Sylvia’ whom he met 6 years ago at the Bar des aviateurs for whom it now transpires he has mistaken her. Profuse apologies follow as the woman, having told him that it is “not nice, not nice at all” to be followed (thanks for this devastating undercutting of His flaneur privileges – a sort of 3 points on his license admonishment), blows him a kiss as the tram moves on. One might as well be watching the Lynx effect in operation. Or an ad for Carlsberg.

Bereft he takes to the bar – in what may be a flashback, corroboration of the story he has told the woman on the tram, or a self-justifying reverie retrospectively fabricating the story in question – and attempts to seduce a dazed, glazed-eyed young woman. The evocation of Manet’s A bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881-82) is well-wrought and beautifully composed. By contrast, what an assault then on both audio and visual perception is to follow with a posturing machismo in the song and a wild and abandoned ‘raunchy’ dance by the woman who has ignored His attempts at seduction. A montage of repulsions!

The next scene cuts to an interior with the form of a naked sleeping woman lying next to Him and illuminated tastefully and fleetingly by the lights of passing traffic. Guerín may not be able to resist cliché; at least he has enough determination for indirection to allow passing lights to allow the ‘conquest’ to come into view.

On with the quest to find the Ariadne’s thread out of this labyrinth which always leads back to the cathedral, or failing that the ubiquitous ‘Laure je t’aime’ graffiti visible on what appear to be most facades of the city. The graffiti underlines the repetitive nature of the man’s days as it does of his perambulations. It shows him trapped in the labyrinth, fleetingly perceiving the trailing threads of a woman’s hair (near the end of the film, the hair flows in a rising wind, as women cross each other’s paths pacing up and down awaiting the next tram, with Him static in the shelter gazing on), gazing on straight into the city for signs of Sylvia’s trail.

This labyrinth is instated. Ariadne’s thread will not be found. He will sit, wait and spill drinks but there will be no encounter to jolt him out of fascination. If only Guerín actually delivered this conclusion. Instead two vignettes confirm quite a different outcome. As he sits gazing into and across the space of passing women (which parade of light summer dresses and hair is worthy of a L’Oreal advert, but also one token black woman, dressed in white in an extraordinarily racist decision, and a sort of minotaur – a disfigured woman with one eye) his eyes alight once more on the would-be Sylvia. She is on a tram and as it moves out of frame she is seen greeting an unseen fellow-passenger with a handshake. Fortunately (for Him) it is only handshake. His face is reactionless. Cut to the café. He has taken up smoking in order that the supposedly inherently comic African street-seller’s (another racist inclusion) frog-croak lighter can finally be employed for its practical function. As he lights up the waitress from the early café scene herself is ignited into a laughter which says: you have beguiled me, I am yours if you want me. But he is still waiting for Sylvia and so he sets off after another woman in red. Just as for the bearer of the narrative voice and the avid gaze in Baudelaire, He just keeps on looking. That avid gaze is offered up in En la cuidad de Sylvia as something to be affirmed as if it were the conscience of contemporary cinema (in the eyes of certain critics). For all its remarkable evocation of the quotidian life of a modern European city and for all its manner of extracting the extraordinary from the banal, this avid gaze is toxic, defiantly resurrecting the spectre of Baudelaire’s flaneur. Now please leave us alone.

Cependant des démons malsains dans l'atmosphère
S'éveillent lourdement, comme des gens d'affaire,
Et cognent en volant les volets et l'auvent.
À travers les lueurs que tourmente le vent
La Prostitution s'allume dans les rues;
Comme une fourmilière elle ouvre ses issues;
Partout elle se fraye un occulte chemin,
Ainsi que l'ennemi qui tente un coup de main;
Elle remue au sein de la cité de fange
Comme un ver qui dérobe à l'Homme ce qu'il mange.