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In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerin, Spain/France)

This year’s trip to Toronto was worth it just to encounter In the City of Sylvia, which will surely be among my favorite films of the decade. It’s such an exquisite, small little film that it’s simultaneously impossible to ruin by describing and best seen knowing as little as possible about in advance. I was hooked from the opening scenes, when a writer and artist visiting Strasbourg idles around a café sketching in his journal and people watching. Even though, on the surface, nothing is happening, Guerin’s mastery of mood, sound, composition, and editing makes every scene engrossing. I began to worry that eventually a plot would develop and ruin what I was loving about the film; thankfully Guerin is able to add emotional weight through a skeletal backstory without tipping the scales too heavily in that direction. It’s a film that’s made up almost entirely of grace notes. A stopover in a bar (“L’Aviateur,” perhaps a reference to Eric Rohmer’s The Aviator’s Wife) is so lovely that it’s one of the two moments in the festival when a film brought a tear to my eye. (Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra is the other.) The film heavily recalls one of Bresson’s most unknown and underappreciated films, Four Nights of a Dreamer, minus the Dostoevsky story that serves as that film’s source material. It could also be described as a flaneur’s Playtime. Below is the Spanish trailer for the film, it consists of one shot from the film and should give you a sense of the remarkable pleasures and framings that can be found within. Right now the film has no US distributor, but I expect it will catch the eye of receptive filmgoers at the New York Film Festival next month and then hopefully begin to travel through North America’s more rarified film circuit of museums and cinematheques.