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Too much of everything

Such a frustrating disappointment

Just perfect...

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

I have a fondness with concentrated observation, and observation of sound in particular while moving through it. E.g. in a car moving through traffic, how to discern individual sound in the cacophony? It ties in with the true perception sought in meditation, the much sought embodiment that everything is empty and everything is in flux. With the right concentration even the most distressing cacophony of street traffic becomes a series of small events that arise and disappear - what is constant is the silence from which they arise and which is wonderfully impregnated with all possible sound.There is a rich tradition of Zen Masters who, according to legend, attained their enlightenment at the ringing of a distant temple bell. And there is that parable about the awakened mind as a butterfly quietly resting on a bell. Even the Tibetans of the 'Diamond Vehicle', the most esoteric of all and riddled with ritual, stress the importance of allowing right concentration to be guided by the ear.Heck, even the hack writers of those unimaginative and strictly practical 'make-your-own-film' guides stress the importance of good sound. They have intuitively grasped that it makes film come alive. Now images can play tricks to the mind like a cat chases after a piece of string, but sound is always true when perceived. Dreams are full of vivid imagery but empty of sound.So it is always interesting to me to be able to slip into a film that has created a rich tappestry of sound; the effect is always aural, like a glove in which the concentrated mind can fit. Antonioni was a master of this, and more recently others like the Coens and Weeresethakul.Guided by the ear, we discover here a city in motion. I prefer this to be tied to an adventurous camera, but here what moves is the world - usually we are fixed in place, the characters or camera. It is all about those fleeting glimpses of people fixed in place as the world moves, a world mute with answers but full with the buzz of life. And about reflections as those fleeting glimpses cast for a moment then gone again, fixed on faces in glass panels or behind them, in advertising billboards, or mute faces in a cafe obscuring one the other.The eye casts upon this fleeting world its own associations of meaning and narrative, a last measure of holding on - here abstracted as the pursuit around town of the girl Sylvia, always elusive. The young portrait painter seeking her is always sketching faces in his book, hoping to contain what escapes him and finally surmise the elusive. But his sketches are equally mute with answers, pencil strokes unfinished suggesting vague outlines to be filled. The last sketch in his sketch book is the blank face of a woman beckoning "ssh!", the next pages are blank. A wind tosses the pages helter skelter.Resnais was there some decades ago with Marienbad. Antonioni in a way. Yoshida, as transfiguring these two into his own rhetoric. Like those films, Sylvia is also a visualized drone about people caught in disparate planes of existence, fumbling each behind his own glass panel view of the world.It's fine stuff, though being so distinctly French it will not arouse cinematic maelstroms. Or perhaps it will if it falls on the right ears, those transcendent shots of reflections and silhouettes on moving trains. It's a worthy film that you should watch.

Quaffing beer after beer in a café in sun-soaked Strasbourg is a pleasure none of us have enjoyed quite as much as we'd like. In the City of Sylvia is the next best thing, and has the benefit of costing a lot less. This really is pure cinema as it was originally intended: an absolute delight for the senses that is appealing on a base level, but has depth to it too. With virtually no dialogue, the film instead indulges in simple pleasures, and a simple idea goes with it: A man, who we know only as 'Él', returns to the city to find a woman he thought he met years before. After apparently seeing her in the café, he follows her through the winding streets, its dark corners and its open spaces. It's a profile of a city paradise, where we hear only sounds of footsteps and overheard, muffled conversations, but we are presented with a picture of extreme beauty and wonderment. A world of youthful optimism, of desperate yearning, and of love for the sake of love is put across through a beautiful setting filled with almost exclusively beautiful people. It's Él's perspective of the world we see, and it's a naive one. But that doesn't really matter. An hour and a half of blissful naivety is OK from time to time, so just bask and luxuriate in its hedonistic glory.

I only ever write a review if I feel strongly about a film. I went to watch this movie with a friend in Manchester, to say it was boring would be a compliment! In fact I overheard to ladies say "I wish Mark had come to watch this movie, it would have been great punishment" and I could not have described it better myself! This movie is truly bad….I love world cinema but this film had no story line, hardly any dialect and the scenery itself was poor. If you want to wonder through streets following strangers then this is the movie for you! but do not expect to see any great architecture as all you will see is walls and tarmac! Within five minutes of the movie the boredom is set, having to observe a guy starring into space….and quite frankly the boredom never really leaves, I sat through this movie thinking it may get better but unfortunately it just gets worse, don't waste your money or your time in going to watch this especially dire film!

I am loathe to say this as I rather enjoyed having a proxy version of my favourite (London) past time - watching people. However, this is a misconceived, ill-constructed film which makes a palindromic attempt to inflate a document of urban life whilst deconstructing a (half-baked) thriller.The film is three acted (three 'nights'). In the first a man watches girls. In the second he follows one. In the third he watches them again, although there's a suggestion that he may have acted on what he's learnt from the first two. The film's merits are largely to do with the unimpeachably youthful beauty of the principals, although Michaël Balerdi, the young man, is a distractingly weak actor. As I mentioned I also liked the nicely photographed corners of Strasbourg and the drama inherent in the smattering of tracking shots...... alas, these tracking shots are mucky, inconsistently rendered (an un-steadycam?). The continuity errors are glaring. I was also easily off-put by boom mic intrusion and imperfections on the print, as well as hopelessly rendered foley sound (really bad!).The worst thing - and this is no one's fault - is that once the 'pursuit' gets going, the film immediately looks like the opening sequence of Michael Haneke's Caché. If you even begin to compare these similarly themed films Guerin's piece begins to look very clumsy indeed. 3/10