well, many of the people above me wrote that the movie was bad, but I actually really enjoyed it. I watched it in the Jerusalem Film Festival, and to be honest, one of the best movies I have seen. why? first of all, the cinematography is amazing. they have in most of the shots beautiful views, and interesting ways to film. second of all, the sound was VERY well made, and basically, those are the two main factors that make this movie a good movie. I think that you have MAX 100-200 words in the whole movie, and it is more of an artistic film, without really a very complex story to tell...
I enjoyed it a lot, and I recommend it to Cinema lovers, because of its complex and interesting ways of film, and the wonderful soundtrack. if you are going to just "watch a movie"don't go because you will get bored.
Plot summary
A man returns to a city to try to track down a woman he met six years earlier.
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
November 05, 2022 at 03:11 AM
Director
Top cast
Movie Reviews
Interesting Film...
Strasbourg Goose
Guerin makes Erich Rohmer look like Speedy Gonzales and elevates watching paint dry to a new level. As a travelogue it's interesting and shows downtown Strasbourg from several angles none of which is designed to put potential visitors off. It's semi-referential on several levels recalling among other Before Sunrise/Sunset in both of which two young people explored a city. Here, of course, though there are two young people involved they are not together inasmuch as one is more or less stalking the other in the (as it turns out) mistaken belief that she is someone he knows. For reasons best known to Guerin he has split his non-action over three days in which nothing happens all at once. Nice pictures shame about lack of plot.
An Everyman romance
Gone with the Wind. When Harry Met Sally. The English Patient. While these are all great love stories, I have to ask: is ANYONE's life really like that? Here we have a film that's just as cinematically powerful, and yet it tells a love story which most of us have probably experienced. Plain & simple, this is the story of a missed encounter revisited years later. Based on director José Luis Guerín's real life experience, this is the story of an artist who meets a girl and, years later, returns to the city where they met. He has only a handful of clues as to who she is or where she may be: a cocktail napkin with a map drawn on it, a box of matches, and a vague recollection of what she looked like.
What follows is a very poetic 80 minutes of people-watching. He sees girls who look like her but he's not sure, so he scrutinizes them from a distance, draws them, on occasion follows them or tries to strike up a conversation. Wow, that sounds sorta creepy. But it's not. That's largely due to the lead actor's innocent boyish looks--the kind where he could stare at you for 10 minutes and you never feel threatened. He is purely an observer, and for anyone who has always wanted to indulge in people-watching but never dared for fear of being arrested, "In the City of Sylvia" is a real treat.
One thing to bear in mind is that this is a very motionless story. I mean that literally as well as figuratively. Camera shots are very still and lingering while the plot is equally slow. So if you're looking for a typical Hollywood love story you shouldn't even bother with this. But if the phrase "a picture is worth 1,000 words" means anything to you, then this is worth checking out.
Like I said in the beginning, this is a love story we've all been through, whether literally or in our whimsical reveries. All of us have that certain stranger burned into our brain from years ago: someone at a bus stop, the person you sat behind in junior high, the checkout person at a grocery store whom you had a momentary soul connection with. Wouldn't it be interesting to try to find them years later? Or is it best left idealized in our nostalgic memory? One way or another, it's this sort of mysterious longing that embodies the essence of romance. I'm grateful to director José Luis Guerín for showing us the beauty in it.