"Oh, how many times I was in love with no one. With the ideal. With the woman of my dreams." – Jacques ("Four Nights of a Dreamer" - dir Robert Bresson)
Though initially similar to the romances of Eric Rohmer and Richard Linklater, Jose Guerin's "In the City of Sylvia" eventually reveals itself to be loose remake of Robert Bresson's "Four Nights of a Dreamer".
Bresson's film was about an artist (who looks similar to the male lead in Guerin's film) who wanders about Paris, observing its various female inhabitants. He loves these beautiful strangers, and becomes infatuated with their little gestures and personal quirks, which he gathers and remembers and diligently stores. Eventually he begins fantasising about finding his "ideal woman", this "ideal" being a "composite" of all the "beautiful gestures" and "attractive women" he observes during the day.
Bresson's artist eventually meets Marthe, a young woman who is gloomy because a lover of hers promised to meet her in Paris, but never showed up. The artist and the woman then spend four days together (both films take place over four days, each night signalled by a title card), sharing intimate stories and romantic gazes, though their relationship swiftly ends when Marthe's lover reappears. The artist then becomes disillusioned. Bresson's lesson: there is no ideal image, fantasies are fragile, there is always a gap between desire and reality, and the closer one gets to Desire, the closer one often gets to trauma, self-inflicted pain and self sabotage.
Guerin's film is almost identical, though it tells the tale from a slightly different perspective. Here the lead character becomes Marthe's lover, who returns after six years to find that she has left him for the male lead in Bresson's film. The result is a film that, though it owes huge debts to Bresson, stakes out new territory and is strangely absorbing.
We begin with a shot of a travel map and the name of a café. We then see Guerin's dreamer sitting on a hotel bed, frantically scrawling on a notepad. He seems to be writing something – maybe poetry – but later it is established that he is an excellent drawer (the artist in Bresson's film is a painter).
The dreamy artist then leaves his hotel room and sets off to find the café at which he first met Sylvia. He sits down with a glass of beer and a small notepad, and begins to quickly sketch the faces of the various women around him. Is he passing time with these sketches? Is he waiting for someone? Is he cataloguing women?
The film then launches into its best sequence, director Jose Guerin cutting between the different faces at the café, constantly changing his compositions so that characters overlap, their bodies superimposed upon one another, hands blocking faces, shoulders blocking heads, heads blocking torsos, depths of fields constantly shifting as bodies flow into and over one another. Guerin cuts back and forth, left and right, eventually building to a nice little crescendo. This is all cut to the tune of "Gasn Nign", a Yiddish folk tune.
This little sequence ends when the artist sees a woman seated inside the café. She sits behind a pane of glass, the reflected faces of all the "sketched women" superimposed over her own face. Like Bresson's film, she is a composite of the artist's various, chauvinistic fantasies. After sketching every face in the café, he selects her, picking her out of the crowd.
The woman – impossibly attractive – leaves the café. The artist follows her, believing that he knows her. "Sylvie?" he calls out, but she doesn't respond, though a flicker of recognition seems to peel across her face.
The film them launches into its second best sequence. The artist confronts the woman on a electric tram. "Are you Sylvie?" he asks. "What is it?" she responds. Throughout the conversation she denies being Sylvie, yet her choice of words ("Now she is older, but still young") continually undermine her claims.
The artist apologises for disturbing the woman, and disappears into a bar. Sylvie – his ideal woman – has abandoned him. Maybe she was Sylvie. Maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was and has moved on. Regardless, the artist picks up some faceless stranger in a bar and promptly has sex with her.
The film ends with the artist sitting at a train station, quite literally waiting for his "Sylvie" to arrive. During this sequence, and the previous one in the bar, Guerin uses the various actors we witnessed in the café and strategically places them all around the artist. These women are always surrounding him, but he turns his back to them, forever fixated on the fantasy.
8/10 – An interesting film, though it unintentionally dips into some serious chauvinism (even if it is precisely this which it attempts to undermine). Our lead actor is likewise miscast; with his blue eyes, designer stubble, gorgeous hair, unbuttoned shirt and square jaw, he looks more like a Calvin Klein model than a struggling artist. Bresson used a young boy with similar features, but his artist was more morose, less handsome.
Guerin's "artist" is thus ridiculously out of place. He's the kind of fantasy image artists have of themselves: a kind of wondering playboy who seduces women and bowls them over with his cute sketches. Guerin's "artist" comes across as an annoying fraud. A better film would have cast someone else. Or better yet, why not cast an elderly man and have him sketch and stalk little school kids? Yeah, I could see that making money. Instant blockbuster.
Worth one viewing.
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